Banks Bet on Bitcoin Despite Calling it a Con

Bitcoin has been all the rave lately producing record-breaking numbers currently priced at $10,975.62 per coin. Despite the consensus that Bitcoin should not be taken seriously, the words of bankers and financial entities do not match their obvious interest behind the scenes. During its early stages, the young cryptocurrency was seen as mostly a way for criminals and black market cartels to profit and still be under the radar. One outspoken opponent of Bitcoin has been JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, saying earlier September that “if you were a drug dealer, a murderer, stuff like that, you are better off doing it in bitcoin than U.S. dollars. So there may be a market for that, but it’d be a limited market.” In a recent blog, Dimon also mentioned that people who invested in Bitcoin were ‘stupid’ and that the hype was merely a ‘fraud’ that will eventually fade away. However, now that its application has become mainstream with over $300 billion in digital currencies, traditional banking institutions are quietly incorporating its uses for their business.

Remember Dimon’s openly uninterested attitude towards the average banker’s ‘kryptonite?’ Well, either he had a change of heart or was fibbing all along because shortly after, the firm announced that they were looking into allowing their clients to trade bitcoin futures. Moreover, JPMorgan Strategist, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, solidified their ambition moving forward saying on Friday that:

The prospective launch of bitcoin futures contracts by established exchanges in particular has the potential to add legitimacy and thus increase the appeal of the cryptocurrency market to both retail and institutional investors.

Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, has also recently taken a liking to the cryptocurrency despite his resistance to believing it’s a sound investment. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Blankfein shared that Bitcoin is not for him but:

there is a lot of things that there weren’t for me in the past that have worked out very well. If it was 20 years forward and it worked out, I could tell you why it worked out. But based on everything that I know, I am not guessing that it will work out.

On another note, Citibank CEO, Michael Corbat, believes that Bitcoin will forcefully disrupt the state of our current monetary system. Since 2015, Citibank has expressed its interest in crypto and similar technologies. They are developing their very own currency called ‘Citicoin’ that deploy blockchain distributed ledger abilities. This is mainly because Corbat feels that Bitcoin and similar models pose a “real enough threat” to the economy and governments will have to become more proactive in catering to its presence. In an interview with Bloomberg, Corbat said that:

It’s likely that we’re going to see governments introduce, not cryptocurrencies – I think cryptocurrency is a bad moniker for that – but a digital currency.

In all fairness, big banks do have many reasons to attack platforms like Bitcoin. What is now branded as the ‘people’s currency,’ Bitcoin is decentralized and there’s nothing scarier than having wealth roam outside the grasp of government and banking control. Still, one cannot overlook the growth and the overwhelming influence it has on the younger generations. In a recent survey by Blockchain Capital, 70% of the 10,000 millennial participants expressed their dissatisfaction with bank’s interest rates, and nearly 65% were attracted to Bitcoin because they are more in charge of how it’s managed. The founder of Blockchain Capital commented on the results saying:

The younger generation has been notoriously quicker to act on new technologies, including the latest smartphones, which have enabled millennials to invest in Bitcoin over the last few years, before large hedge funds and financial institutions started to get involved.

It seems that the younger crowd is sick of the same old love songs composed in their bank statements and are open to trying something different. The real question is whether or not cryptocurrencies are built to last or is it merely a bubble that will leave as quick as it came. As of now it may be too soon to tell, but one thing is for sure; people of all ages and demographics are recognizing the viability it possesses in the future economy.

What do you guys personally think about Bitcoin? Is their potential in the coin or is it a con? Let us know what you think by dropping us a note.


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