John McAfee challenges Jamie Dimon's bitcoin skepticism

John McAfee challenged JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon's skepticism of bitcoin.

Dimon on Tuesday called bitcoin a "fraud" that will eventually blow up. McAfee, whose company MGT Capital Investments mines the cryptocurrency, said he respects Dimon and people in his position "are not idiots," but he challenged Dimon's criticism.

"You called bitcoin a fraud ,I'm a bitcoin miner. We create bitcoins. It costs over $1,000 per coin to create a bitcoin. What does it cost to create a U.S. dollar? Which one is the fraud? Because it costs whatever the paper costs, but it costs me and other miners over $1,000 per coin. It's called proof of work."

Miners invest "massive" amounts of supercomputing power and electricity in creating bitcoins, McAfee said. Surely then, there is value in creating a bitcoin, he added.

"And the fact that bitcoin is consistently growing in its use and its value has to say something," McAfee said. "Sure it will rise and fall as all new technologies are. But at the same time, it is certainly not a fraud."

McAfee made a lewd bet on Twitter earlier this summer that bitcoin would reach $500,000 within three years. On Wednesday, he said people called bitcoin a bubble that was bursting at one point, and then it smashed their expectations. Plus, the long-term trend of bitcoin has been consistently up, McAfee added.

Source: Bloomberg Pro Terminal

Trader Bozhidar Arabadzhiev

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