Billionaire Tim Draper reacts to Jamie Dimon launching his own cryptocurrency
Nearly two years after JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon famously bashed bitcoin, calling it a “fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs,” he announced that his bank has created its own cryptocurrency prototype.
Dubbed JPM Coin, the new tokens, are set to be tested on clients of the big bank’s wholesale payments business.
The news comes as big switcheroo to some, who thought Dimon was against the new technology.
But to others, especially billionaire and bitcoin enthusiast Tim Draper, who has millions invested in the cryptocurrency, its “great news” for overall industry.
“Not many bitcoin knockoffs have worked particularly well, but they all add to the interest in bitcoin,” Draper told FOX Business on Sunday.
He compared the news to “a bellwether akin to Apple welcoming IBM into the PC business.”
While the price of bitcoin did not have any immediate reaction to JPMorgan’s news last week, it has jumped more than 5 percent over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketcap.com.
Draper, a longtime venture capitalist, who has been right about investing in big companies such as Skype, Hotmail and Tesla, has poured hundreds of millions of his wealth into bitcoin over the years because he believes its technology blockchain will be the centerpiece of our new “virtual world.”
“This is going to be the biggest change in the history of the world and it’s so exciting,” Draper told FOX Business last May. “I thought the internet was super exciting, but this is going to completely change everything and the government itself is going to change.”
And despite bitcoin’s rapid price decline from a record high of about $20,000 in December 2017 to about $3,800 today, he believes by 2022, bitcoin will hit $250,000.
He said the increase will be driven by the public that will eventually realize they want and need a global decentralized secure currency.
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“Over time, when they start taking bitcoin, I’m going to be pretty much moving everything [out of the banks]. There is no reason to hold on to shells, when you’ve got gold,” he said.