Billionaire investor George Soros has described the most popular cryptocurrency bitcoin as a bubble, and said it represents a safe haven for authoritarian regimes.
“Normally when you have a parabolic curve, eventually it has a very sharp break,” Soros said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, as quoted by Bloomberg.
"As long as you have dictatorships on the rise, you will have a different ending, because the rulers in those countries will turn to bitcoin to build a nest egg abroad," Soros said.
“But it’s nevertheless a typical bubble, which is always based on a misunderstanding like the tulip mania. But the blockchain technology can be put to positive use and we use it actually in helping migrants to communicate with their families and to keep their money safe and carry it with themselves."
While accusing ‘dictatorships’ of using bitcoin to move money abroad, Soros himself has transferred $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations in recent years. By doing so, he availed of a loophole in US taxation laws, and the money he stashed can never be reached by the US Internal Revenue Service. The $18 billion he shielded from taxes is as big as 10 percent of the value of all bitcoins currently in use.
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