Billionaire Ray Dalio is skeptical of BTC

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Billionaire Ray Dalio is pessimistic about the future of BTC. In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Dalio was asked, “do you have a take on digital currencies?’ To which Dalio voiced his concerns about BTC and his belief that we will see more central bank digital currencies in the future.

Dalio said he has three reasons which lead him to believe that BTC will not “succeed in the way people hope…” 

“A currency has to be an effective medium of exchange, store hold of wealth, and the governments want to control it,” said Dalio, before going on to explain why BTC does not fit into any of these boxes.

“I today can’t take my BTC and go buy things easily with it. As a store hold of wealth, it’s so volatile that its volatility based on speculation is so great that it’s not an effective store hold of wealth; which is also one of the reasons that it has a problem being a transaction vehicle…Thirdly, if it becomes material, governments won’t allow it, they will outlaw it, they will use whatever teeth they have to enforce that.”

BTC will not succeed. 

Many BTC supporters believe that BTC will go on to replace fiat currency altogether, or that BTC is the new gold. However, BTC will not replace fiat currency, and calling BTC ‘digital gold’ is a stretch. 

Dalio is right to say that the government has a distaste for anything it does not have a hand in. With no way to control and enact financial policies, you will not be seeing any governments adopt BTC as its national currency. 

In addition, BTC is far too volatile to be used as a medium of exchange, not to mention the throughput issues the network suffers from that often raise the average transaction fee to prices higher than it costs to transact in fiat currency. As of press time, the average tx fee on the BTC network is $7.77.

And although the same economic conditions that benefit gold are beneficial for BTC, the gold market is thousands of years old with a good track record–BTC is not even 15 years old and is generally highly correlated with the S&P 500.

Central Bank Digital Currencies will succeed

“Then there are digital currencies, let’s say the dollar or the euro or the Chinese renminbi that is digitized, I think we are going to see a lot more of this type,” said Dalio.

Given Dalio’s previous comments regarding what makes a currency successful, it is no surprise that he sees the potential for a central bank digital currency. By digitizing fiat currencies on a blockchain, governments around the world can optimize their economies and reduce their costs. Many countries around the world are currently researching, developing, and piloting their CBDC, with Lebanon being the latest country to announce its plans to launch a CBDC in 2021.