Yesterday, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, told a conference that he thinks the cryptocurrency bitcoin is a “fraud” and “not a real thing.” He declared that the open-source protocol would eventually “close.” He even went so far as to warn his employees that if they were caught trading bitcoin, they would be fired “in a second” for their “stupidity.”
Dimon has been a cryptocurrency Cassandra for years. He first raised the alarm (as far as Quartz’s use of search engines can tell) about bitcoin in January 2014, observing that it was “a terrible store of value” that was mainly used for illicit purposes. Over the years he issued several more warnings. Here they are:
While Dimon’s original critique was prescient—at the time a major rally was turning into a crash—his other warnings haven’t been as profitable. If you’d ignored his advice and bought bitcoin when he warned against it, you’d be in the money two out of three times.
As for Dimon’s latest admonition? Well, if he got it wrong and the cryptocurrency revolution sweeps banks like his away, at least one member of the Dimon family is well hedged: He told the conference that one of his daughters bought bitcoin and is sitting on tidy profits. “Now she thinks she’s a genius,” he said.