Peter Thiel calls Bitcoin 'Chinese financial weapon', urges US to tighten rules on crypto

PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel on April 6 urged the US government to consider tighter regulations on cryptocurrencies and warned them against a possible attack from China. While speaking at a virtual event by Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel revealed that he believes that cryptocurrency has the potential to undermine the United States. “I do wonder whether, at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought [of] in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the US,” Thiel said. 

The PayPal co-founder, who himself is a major investor in virtual currency ventures as well as in cryptocurrencies, added, “It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar. (If) China’s long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the US should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works”. 

Thiel was also joined by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. At the event, their conversation was largely focused on the sour relationships between the US and China. During the talk, Thiel even expanded upon previous criticism of Google, which he accused of working against American interest, and said that he’d pressed employees in the company’s artificial intelligence division about whether their technology was being used in China’s Xinjiang region, where the Western nations say the country has detained ethnic Uyghurs in internment camps. 

Thiel said, was, “Well, we don’t really know—and don’t ask any questions”. He continued: “You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation”. 

Thiel says US should follow India

Further, the PayPal co-founder even went on to attack Apple Inc. He described Apple as a problem for the US interests. He said that Apple is probably the one tech company that’s “structurally a real problem”. He added that  Apple is one that has “real synergies with China”. 

Thiel even went on to say that the US should “follow” India in banning TikTok, the social media app owned by Chinese company ByteDance Ltd. He said that the app has sort of “incredible exfiltration of data about people”. Thiel noted that it was banned, TikTok would likely be replaced by similar apps, as has happened in Inda. “I don’t think it was like a tremendous, tremendous loss” in India, he said. 

(Image: Twitter/Unsplash/AP)