Bill Harris, first CEO of PayPal: Bitcoin is the biggest fraud in history

Bill Harris has recently made a post on Recode in which he expressed his views on Bitcoin. As he thinks, Bitcoin is a massive pump-and-dump scheme.

Pump-and-dump schemes happen when founders are driving up the price of the asset by deception tactics and then sell it, getting big amounts of money as a result. Bill Harris also rejects the ability of Bitcoin to be a means of payment, a store of value and to have an intrinsic value. As noted by the press, there are already objections emerging, even conservative financial outlets post columns with detailed rebuttal of statements made by one of the founders of PayPal.

Other PayPal executives are not as critical towards Bitcoin: the corporation co-founder Peter Thiel has quite recently stated that money could have bubble features too and Bitcoin could serve as a reserve form of money, while ex-CTO Max Levchin noted that in some cases, Bitcoin or Ethereum are used purely for promotional purposes and cryptocurrencies were still developing. The only other internationally famous person who called Bitcoin a fraud is JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, but he has been seen regretting saying this a few months later.

Image courtesy of Spencer Brown / The Business Journals