JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon Questions Whether Bitcoin Supply is Capped: ‘You Guys All Believe That?’

Rudy TakalaOct 11th, 2021, 2:50 pm
 
Jamie Dimon

Michel Euler/Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday he “challenged” someone to tell him bitcoin’s supply had been mathematically capped at 21 million.

“I’ll just challenge the group to one other thing,” Dimon reportedly said during an address to the Institute of International Finance. “How do you know it ends at 21 million? You all read the algorithms? You guys all believe that? I don’t know, I’ve always been a skeptic of stuff like that.”

Bitcoin was released in 2009 with open-source code showing supply capped at 21 million units. Nearly 18.9 million have been released to date, while production of the final 2 million is scheduled to take until around 2140.

Dimon piled on in his comments on Monday, but said his bank would offer clients financial instruments related to bitcoin despite his critical view. “I personally think that bitcoin is worthless,” Dimon added. “I don’t want to be a spokesperson. I don’t care. It makes no difference to me. Our clients are adults. They disagree. That’s what makes markets. So, if they want to have access to buy yourself bitcoin, we can’t custody it but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible, access.”

JPMorgan quietly began offering six investment funds in August to wealthy clients interested in bitcoin and Ethereum, including four from Grayscale Investments and one from Osprey Funds.

However, Dimon has been a long-time critic of cryptocurrency. He called bitcoin a “fraud” in September 2017, when it was priced around $4,000. He said months later that he held “regrets” about the remark, though he continued efforts to dissuade consumers from purchasing it. “My own personal advice to people is, stay away from it,” he said in testimony in May before the House Financial Services Committee. “That does not mean the clients don’t want it. … I don’t smoke marijuana, but if you make it nationally legal, I’m not going to stop our people from banking it.”

Cryptocurrency consumers were nonplussed by the comments as of Monday afternoon, when bitcoin was priced a little higher than $57,000. Observers widely expect it to break all-time highs in the weeks ahead, surpassing a $64,000 record set in April.

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