Jim Chanos: Bitcoin is the last thing I want to own

Jim Chanos, who is often short on the market and predicted the collapse of Enron Corp. believes Bitcoin will sink in a crisis scenario.

The dollar has an advantage when things go wrong because governments can act as last resort creditors, Chanos said in an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking published on Monday. Digital coins, on the other hand, have no such backing.

“For those who believe that you need to own digital currency as a store of value in the worst-case scenario, that’s exactly the case in which a digital currency will work the least,” he said. “The last thing I’d want to own is Bitcoin if the grid goes down.”

Food would be better, he added.

Bitcoin influence the direction of the crypto market but that could soon change

Bithoin's euphoria over the past year with other cryptoLooks fits into the "loophole cycle", in which people less skeptical about long market margins, focusing on investments that usually look too good to are true. The bull market of the 1990s ended with accounting scandals such as Enron. Later another test led to the global financial crisis in 2008, said Jim Chanos.

Japan: The land of the rising coin

"We are now in the ninth year of this bullish market, just as we did in the 1990s, so I suspect things are starting to happen now," he said, referring to Bitcoin, the other cryptos and ICO's. "It's just a game of speculative ability that appears to be a breakthrough in monetary policy."

Source: Bloomberg Pro Terminal

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