Jordan Belfort, the real “Wolf of Wall Street,” is once again warning against buying into bitcoin. ... These comments about bitcoin mirror his recent statements to The Financial Times. In October, Belfort warned that promoters of ICOs were “perpetuating a massive scam of the highest order on everyone. - Dec 19, 2017 SOurce: CNN Live

**Peter Schiff is wrong about bitcoin for the same reason he was right about the housing market crash. That’s what makes his views on bitcoin fascinating.** The Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policy steadily drives down the value of the dollar. This is by design, because it gets people to spend and invest their money instead of hanging onto it. Mainstream economists from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman are proponents of this design, believing it spurs economic growth. The drawback, as Schiff and the Austrian economists he studied have pointed out, is the boom and bust economic cycle. As money expands, the rush to spend it creates misallocation of capital to high risk, unproductive investments and speculative bubbles. When the market readjusts prices to reflect the true value of the economy, there’s a crash. Bitcoin didn’t exist when the housing market crashed and the Great Recession dragged the entire world economy into the doldrums. But if it had, one could imagine how much capital would have fled to it as a global macro hedge. Bitcoin has already proven itself as a safe haven asset like gold. Like gold, the bitcoin price is uncorrelated to equities. Peter Schiff’s question was obviously a tongue-in-cheek wisecrack. But the real question is what will happen first: $3,000 spot price of gold, or bitcoin reaches its previous all time high of $20,000? Let’s hope it’s the latter. Because if gold roughly doubles in price over the next couple years, it means we’re having another Great Recession. Source: CNBC