In an interview with Fox Business, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have challenged JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to short bitcoin on the futures market if he remains confident that bitcoin will fail in the long run.
“We’ve been working really hard to give Jamie Dimon an opportunity to short bitcoin, and anybody who says that you know, it’s a fraud or a bubble, you can go now [and] put your money where your mouth is, and bet against it,” said Cameron.
Does Jamie Dimon Really Believe Bitcoin is Bad?
On December 14, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) became the first major options exchange and financial institution to list bitcoin futures in partnership with Gemini, a major US-based regulated cryptocurrency exchange run by the Winklevoss twins.
The listing of bitcoin futures by CBOE and Gemini immediately provided a platform and sufficient liquidity for large-scale investors to either invest in bitcoin or short the cryptocurrency. Through the CBOE futures market, Cameron Winklevoss dared Dimon to short bitcoin and bet against the long-term performance of the cryptocurrency if he actually believes that bitcoin is a scam and a fraud as he said before.
Several renowned analysts and experts in the cryptocurrency sector including Ari Paul, the co-founder of Blocktower Capital, do not believe that Jamie Dimon sees bitcoin as a scam or a money laundering tool. Rather, Paul believes that Dimon understands bitcoin better than most people in the market but is purposely misleading the public because he considers bitcoin as a threat to their dominance over the global offshore banking industry.
Paul explained:
“So most of the financial luminaries, I think genuinely don’t understand what it’s trying to be. Jamie Dimon’s an exception. By all accounts, I know people who spoke to him about cryptocurrency four years ago. He gets it, he understands it, probably better than me and he views it, I think, as a brand new competitor to JPMorgan. So he understands that JPMorgan collects a lot of fees for providing a storage of wealth in a secure way that’s judgement resistant to clients, and bitcoin does it an order of magnitude better.
Dimon had criticized and condemned bitcoin in the past not because of its structural, technical, and conceptual flaws, but rather because he considers it as a competitor to JPMorgan’s offshore banking operation, which accounts for the majority of the bank’s profits.
This is a positive and optimistic sign for the long-term growth of bitcoin however, given that major banks like JPMorgan are being threatened by the exponential growth rate of bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market.
Tyler Winklevoss Encourages Dimon to Personally Bet Against Bitcoin
In addition to Cameron’s comments, Tyler Winklevoss further encouraged Dimon to personally bet against bitcoin through the futures market and take JPMorgan’s balance sheet with it.
“We encourage Jamie Dimon, we encourage him to personally bet against it, bitcoin, take J.P. Morgan’s balance sheet, bet against bitcoin. We’ll see what happens,” stated Winklevoss.
Given that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are preparing to clear bitcoin futures on behalf of their clients and assist their customers into the bitcoin market, it is highly unlikely that Dimon or other bankers will short bitcoin because they do not truly believe bitcoin will not succeed.