Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari says Bitcoin – and virtually the entire crypto market – is fraudulent and has very few use cases in sight.
In an interview at the Pacific Northwest Economic Regional (PNWER) Annual Summit, Kashkari said he actually had more faith in the nascent crypto space years ago than he does now.
“I was more optimistic about Bitcoin and crypto five or six years ago. So far what I’ve seen is 99%, 95% – let me be charitable – 95% fraud, hype, noise, and confusion.
You know, why is the dollar so valuable? Because the US government has a monopoly on producing dollars. If you go in your basement and you wanna start producing your own currency, the Secret Service is gonna come knock on your door and put you in handcuffs.
There’s no barrier to you creating your own Bitcoin or me creating my own. I’ll call it Neel coin. Maybe I can’t call it Bitcoin, I’ll call it Neel’s Bitcoin, and then Larry can create Larry coin – and there’s thousands of these garbage coins that have been created. Some of them are complete fraud Ponzi schemes, where they pump it up, they dupe people into investing money, and then the founders rip them off.”
As for Bitcoin, Kashkari says that the world’s biggest crypto is propped up largely by what he sees as a false narrative that the US is on a path towards economic turmoil.
“I always ask people, ‘What problem are you trying to solve?’ And nobody can articulate what the actual problem is. They say, ‘Oh, we don’t want to be Venezuela.’ Yeah, I agree. I don’t want to be Venezuela either. I don’t see any evidence that the US government or the United States of America is on a path to Venezuela. I don’t want to say it’s impossible that something useful would come out of this. It’s certainly possible, but I’ve not seen any use case – other than funding illicit activities like drugs and prostitution – I have not seen any use case that is legitimate so far that Bitcoin solves.”
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