Billionaire David Rubenstein says that Bitcoin (BTC) isn’t going anywhere now due to a wave of massive interest in the king crypto spread around the globe.
In a new interview with Bloomberg, the legendary investor and co-founder of financial services titan Carlyle Group says that interest in BTC and other prominent crypto assets is ramping up worldwide as consumers increasingly covet private transactions.
“There’s no doubt that when interest rates are as high as they are, you don’t need to have gold or other kinds of things to get you some solid return, because you get 5% on treasuries. But eventually [that] 5% will be coming down at some point.
I don’t think Bitcoin and other better-known cryptocurrencies are going to go away. There’s enormous interest around the world in being able to have something you can transfer without the government knowing about it and keeping it private. You can say that people shouldn’t do that, but that’s not going to stop people from doing it.”
According to Rubenstein, even though there is a divide in opinion on crypto among US officials, the rest of the world is becoming more and more open minded. He says people have a strong desire for an alternative currency outside the purview of governments.
“I think Democrats in Congress and particularly the people regulating, the SEC, are skeptical of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But outside the United States, there’s a lot of interest in it. I think FTX really hurt when it went bankrupt…
But a lot of people around the world want to be able to trade in a currency that their government can’t know what they have and they want to be moving [it] around, rightly or wrongly. And so I don’t think Bitcoin is going away. I think the Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pretty supportive of it.”
The SEC currently has pending lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance, two of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, on allegations that the platforms have been selling unregistered securities.
Bitcoin is trading for $29,735 at time of writing, a fractional increase during the last 24 hours.
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