Former PayPal CEO Bill Harris continued his bitcoin bashing world tour on Thursday, arguing on CNBC that cryptocurrency investors will be taken in with a colossal scam.
Harris, who was simply PayPal’s founding CEO but was quickly ousted and replaced, said during an interview on “Fast Money” that cryptocurrency investors are “drinking the Kool-Aid.:
“Many people are drinking the Kool-Aid,” Harris said. “I absolutely consider that money will be digital, happens to be more digital, and is completely digital nonetheless it doesn’t mean we must have a new currency to record that.”
“My autograph is scarce, I often promise i will never autograph certificates more than 21 million times but it doesn’t insure that it is valuable,” he added, referencing that bitcoin’s currency supply is capped at approximately 21 million.
Harris, who also founded popular financial portfolio tracker Personal Capital, further took target initial coin offerings (ICOs), disputing claims that the fundraising model is analogous for the initial public offerings (IPOs) commonly pursued by large startups.
“There’s pointless that a new currency should instantly have large dollars in value,” Harris said.
Then, he dug an ancient gem outside the bitcoin bashing scrapbook, reviving the once-popular “blockchain not bitcoin” anthem.
“There’s the currency like bitcoin then there’s the science, blockchain technology has terrific applications, including financial transactions but we don’t need to have a new currency to acheive it,” Harris said.
The interview marked cost-free time in in the week alone that Harris had embarked with a high-profile rant about bitcoin.
On Tuesday, he penned an op-ed in tech news outlet Recode, by which he argued that cryptocurrency is a “colossal pump-and-dump scheme, brand names which the world hasn’t ever seen.”
He further alleged that cryptocurrency is only used by criminals and the US regulators must be given more authority to intervene with the markets.
But though Harris is actually promoting a decidedly hostile opinion on cryptocurrency, other PayPal executives and alumni now utilize much more favorable views.
Fellow PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel hasn’t already only compared bitcoin to digital gold but also has invested in the asset prolifically through Founders Fund, his investment capital firm.
Xapo CEO Wences Casares — certainly one of Silicon Valley’s first high-profile bitcoin bulls — sits around the board of PayPal.
Even Tesla founder Elon Musk — who replaced Harris at PayPal — owns bitcoin, albeit a very small amount.
