Peter Thiel's Bitcoin Bet

joshpeterson (58)in #news • 8 years ago (edited)

If you were watching crypto-news headlines on New Year's Day, you probably noticed a number of mainstream headlines gloating over Bitcoin's "low" pricing in the markets as if 2017 never happened. Utterly boring and stupid, but that's what we're going to have to put up with for a bit longer until more of them catch up and start doing real reporting about blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies.

Today's news that tech titan Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Founders Fund, had placed a multimillion dollar bet on Bitcoin came as a welcome breath of fresh air. So much so that the headlines are leading my site right now at The Coin Dispatch.

Thiel's past bets (PayPal, Facebook, etc) helped to build our present. Take a look at the Founders Fund's portfolio and you'll see they're not messing around. Chances are you've heard of at least one or two of the companies listed.

The news shouldn't be surprising. Not only has Thiel spoken favorably in the past about the potential of Bitcoin, but his first Internet venture was PayPal. He's had his eye on digital money for nearly two decades. His famously contrarian instincts combined with his familiarity and passion for the fintech space make Bitcoin a logical candidate for him to get behind.

What is suprising, although maybe it shouldn't be, is that amount of money Founders Fund had reportedly invested: $15-20 million USD. Now that bet is reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Naturally, the Bitcoin markets responded favorably to the news, as they should. There's already talk of bigger institutional money moving into the space this year.

Perhaps the Thiel news will force mainstream coverage to look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more seriously. Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and distributed ledger technologies are the new Internet. The sooner they grok this, the smoother the transition is going to be.

Thank you for reading,

- Josh

^{Josh Peterson is a writer living in Denver, CO. He is a 2016-2017 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow for The Fund for American Studies, studying the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy. He is also an advisor to PassageX, a blockchain startup tackling the secondary event ticket market, and the founder and publisher of The Coin Dispatch, a news and opinion site covering cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.}

^{Image Credit: Dan Taylor/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)}

#bitcoin #cryptocurrency #technology #busy

8 years ago in #news by joshpeterson (58)

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