PayPal’s Peter Thiel Calls Bitcoin “Digital Gold”

While many politicians and heads of corporations continue to lambast cryptocurrencies, PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel has backed Bitcoin yet again, calling the virtual currency the future of finance.

Thiel has been a vocal proponent of Bitcoin for some time now, and has been advocating the use of cryptocurrencies and blockchain since 2017. In a recent interview, he compared bitcoin to gold bars placed inside a “vault that never moves”. He elaborated by saying that he saw crypto assets as being “value containers” rather than currencies which would be used to facilitate everyday transactions.

While speaking at an event held at the Economic Club of New York recently, Thiel added:

I would be long bitcoin, and neutral to skeptical of just about everything else at this point with a few possible exceptions. There will be one online equivalent to gold, and the one you’d bet on would be the biggest.

According to reports, Thiel has already made significant Bitcoin investments via his venture capital firm, Founders Fund. It is estimated that these purchases are worth anywhere between $15 million to $20 million. In fact, the investment led to an increase in Bitcoin’s price of over 9% within a span of just 24 hours.

However, there have been instances in the recent past when Thiel admitted that Bitcoin may lose some of its worth and be replaced by its competitor Ethereum. But by and large, his stance has always been one that backs alt-assets and the crypto domain as a whole.