U.S. venture capitalist and billionaire Peter Thiel is concerned that the Chinese Communist Party is using bitcoin to harm the United States.
In comments made Tuesday (April 6) at an online forum hosted by the Richard Nixon Foundation, a California-based think tank, the PayPal co-founder said bitcoin “is a threat to fiat currencies, particularly the U.S. dollar. “
In a tweet, the Nixon Foundation quoted Thiel as saying, “While I am one of the biggest proponents of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, I do wonder if, at this point, Bitcoin should also be seen in part as a financial weapon of the Chinese Communist Party against the United States.”
Thiel said the CCP would like to see two global reserve currencies, not just the U.S. dollar as the default reserve currency. But the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want the yuan to play that role and has used the euro “partially” as a weapon against the dollar in the past. He believes that didn’t “work,” so now the Chinese Communist Party is trying to boost bitcoin.”
Also attending the forum were former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former White House national security adviser Brian O’Brien.
Thiel said, “If the Chinese Communist Party is long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how it works.”
Talking about China’s recent launch of a blockchain-enabled electronic version of the yuan, Thiel was not impressed, saying, “That’s not really a cryptocurrency, it’s just some sort of totalitarian metric.”
In addition to cryptocurrencies, Thiel also criticized Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook, and said the U.S. should censor Apple the most. “Apple is probably structurally the really big problem among tech companies, and Apple is the one company that has real synergy with China.”
The meeting was also attended by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, with the three mainly discussing U.S.-China relations.
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