Balaji Srinivasan on Tuesday said his $1 million bet on bitcoin (BTC) has been closed out ahead of time, and he has donated $1.5 million ($500,000 more than required) to three different entities as settlement.
The former chief technology officer at crypto exchange Coinbase and a former partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Srinivasan in mid-March – shortly after the failures in short order of Silvergate Bank, Signature Bank, and Silicon Valley Bank – said he expected a banking crisis to trigger a sizable devaluation of the U.S. dollar, hyperinflation, and a surge in bitcoin to $1 million by mid-June. He put up $1 million to back his prediction.
He noted that the current U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was at the Federal Reserve ahead of the 2008 global financial crisis and failed to sound any alarms, nor did the then-chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke. Today's crop of leaders, Fed Chair Jerome Powell among them, argued Srinivasan, are similarly in denial.
(by Marc Hochstein)
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