Jesse Powell. Source: Medium
In a recent interview with Real Vision boss Raoul Pal, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell said some startling things.
According to him, Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto may have foreseen a bigger financial crisis than 2008’s Great Recession.
The second to last talk of Real Vision’s exclusive ‘The Crypto Gathering Webinar’ saw Bitcoin and crypto exchange Kraken’s CEO Jesse Powell talk about a lot of insightful stuff.
However, things took an interesting turn when the conversation moved to 2008’s recession and 2012’s banking crisis. Powell said that Satoshi might have predicted a greater economic disaster (than the last two) knocking our doors. He remarked:
… I think Satoshi thought it was for that time may be, saw an ever bigger bubble coming and even worse outcome coming given how we handled the last financial crisis. You know bailing everyone out just delayed the inevitable,….. allowed this extremely fragile system to continue hobbling along..”
He continued by saying that Bitcoin was a way for him to step out of this system and ‘de-risk and have something real and finite and predictable.’ Although, the Kraken CEO admitted that BTC has been quite volatile in the short-term. But he feels over a longer-term Bitcoin has ‘proven to be a great store-of-value.’
Moving forward during the talk, the Real Vision CEO remarked about Bitcoin’s extraordinary performance as an investable asset. He said that BTC is still the best performing asset of all time. Raoul further commented:
…It’s an extraordinary thing and it just feels that [Bitcoin] is becoming more and more relevant.
I mean there’s a US dollar crisis going on right now, a shortage of US dollars… central banks [are] talking about digital currencies, which is desperate, but it’s creating the on ramps and off ramps to the digital world that you envisaged… It feels like that’s all coming..
Further in the interview, Jesse said that central bank digital currencies will have the same problems as their fiat counterparts. This includes things like unlimited money printing, forgery, etc. But despite them being ‘officially sanctioned Tethers or USDC,’ CBDCs will open up more doors for people to get into Bitcoin and crypto.
Fiat crypto tokens will be like ‘gateway drugs’ that will get people into something real as Bitcoin.
On being asked where he sees the crypto space heading in a period of 5 years, the Kraken chief said that Bitcoin as an asset class would continue to see more adoption. The complex learning curve and ‘technical sophistication’ will fade away. BTC will just become like a regular app, where users don’t much think about the ‘machinations’ and complexities.