Peter Thiel calls Bitcoin a Chinese financial weapon

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/peter-thiel-calls-bitcoin-a-chinese-financial-weapon-at-virtual-roundtable

by contemporary343 • 5 years ago

26 11 5 years ago

bloomberg.com

tomComb• 5 years ago

I don't get it. The company he hates the most is Google - the one major tech company to stand up to China and pull out on principle.

Gotta wonder if his hate is motivated by his association/investment in Facebook and his alignment with Trump. (I also think that his camp is pretty angry about Oracle losing that lawsuit and looking for new ways to attack.)

thephyber3• 5 years ago

I don’t get it either.

Thiel criticizes Google for working with China in a Uiygur genocide (but admits he doesn’t have proof). He criticizes Facebook for its stance on Hong Kong democracy because there are more Chinese born employees at FB than Hong Kong born (is that “evidence”?).

First thing — these are foreign policy issues from the perspective of the USA. We (the USA people and our government) have done far worse in the foreign policy sphere.

Also worth mentioning that Theil’s Palantir moved out of the Bay Area partly because he and the other execs didn’t like that Bay Area tech employees are activist about politics and things like foreign policy in their job as stakeholders at those companies — a role he seems to advocate in this article (he just doesn’t like the direction of their advocacy).

Also worth mentioning that he made these comments at an event dedicated to one of the presidents that most damaged the USA in both domestic policy and foreign policy (Richard Nixon) and Thiel publicly supported another more recent president who managed to destroy USA institutions even more than Nixon.

Worth taking these words with a giant grain of salt and observing that this man has a giant log in his eye.

Please don’t take anything in this post as supporting China or any of the FANG companies mentioned. I’m only pointing out that Theil doesn’t seem to have a consistent stance on government policy or what constitutes “hurting America”.

MickerNews• 5 years ago

The "Uighur genocide" war propaganda has gotten completely out of control. Even the US State department dropped it early into Biden's presidency apparently realising how ridiculous it was. However it's still got a lot of momentum and the masses have swallowed it wholesale. It's dumbfounding and terrifying to me how much of it is still regurgitated wholesale on mass media when it's trivially demonstrated that every single part of it comes from CIA funded orgs like the NED or even just random crackpots like Adrian Zenz who are led by God to fight homosexuality and Communism.

The Chinese are supposedly imprisoning or killing millions and the evidence is this one girl who they won't give a passport to, or a google maps satellite image of a school, or a BBC documentary with scary music and shaky cam, or a random person linked with the CIA who managed to "escape".

"Please don’t take anything in this post as supporting China..."

Why you even feel the need to say this is weird.

thephyber3• 5 years ago

I’m not so quick to write off China’s treatment of Uiygurs as terrible for human rights. My understanding is that Tibetans went through similar issues decades before, so my sense is that it’s likely happening, whether or not the source is CIA.

I just think the USA has done far more to encourage this stupid “love your country or we will treat you as a terrorist” attitude that China seems to have adopted. Also the consequences of my country invading Iraq without a real mission or realistic plan destabilizing the region have caused (far?) more than 200k civilian deaths.

I feel like an American complaining about China (which he has zero influence over) and ignoring the problems in America that he can influence is large hypocrisy and it should be poured out, repeatedly.

SigmundA• 5 years ago

I am not a fan of Thiel in general but China has the majority of Bitcoins hash rate last I checked and if the maximalist dreams come true with debasing USD while BTC gains relative value then that is a lot of leverage, no?

FDSGSG• 5 years ago

No, not really. It's not particularly difficult to fork the software if miners start acting out.

mgh22• 5 years ago

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgDkrDeuV6I

I like how Thiel's counter-culture criticisms that seems to go against the crowd gets shut down by big tech and media. It is one of his techniques in his book Zero to One: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” https://fs.blog/2015/11/the-single-best-interview-question-y...

He might just be misunderstood: he is not making conclusions, but asking questions, posting hypotheses or conjectures for further investigation (the scientist method). He is checking against his own biases (investor in Facebook and Bitcoin)

Ex: His support for Trump happened to be a bad bet against the crowd, but he did not endorse him for a 2nd term (after seeing the data). Most Palantir attacks by the tech community are also baseless and political (covered by liberal media).

His suspicions are valid given past observations. Who would blame him for distrusting marketing giants = brainwashing machines like Google, Apple, Facebook and by extension China? Do you see his logic? His law background might actually make him the best advocate for ethics, which big tech hides violations really well with marketing and PR.

Bitcoin may have been countercultural at the beginning, until is was not- right now it is being speculated more like a money making scheme than a promising technology. Thiel's comment might be right onto something, let's not discredit him this early. Remember, he was part of the Paypal mafia...

mgh22• 5 years ago

Why is this flagged? Because Bitcoin admirers don’t agree on an opinion?

Peter Thiel calls Bitcoin a Chinese financial weapon

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