PayPal's Co-founder, Peter Thiel : Bitcoins are Being Underestimated

Co-founder of Paypal, Billionaire and Silicon Valley Giant, Peter Thiel in an interview with FOX Business stated, that he feels "Bitcoins are being underestimated".

“It’s like a reserve form of money. It’s like gold and it’s just a store of value. You don’t actually need to use it to make payment,” he told Maria Bartiromo during an interview at a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

“If bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold and it has a great potential left and it’s a very different kind of thing from what people in Silicon Valley focus on—companies, not algorithms not protocols, but this might be maybe one exception that is very underestimated,” the Silicon Valley elite said.

“You can ask the same questions about gold. What is gold based on? Why is gold valuable?... It’s a tangible asset but it’s also hard to mine. So if it was easy to mine then it wouldn’t be that valuable and we would just have way more gold. So bitcoin is also, it’s mineable, like gold it’s hard to mine, it’s actually harder to mine than gold and so in that sense it’s more constrained,” he said.

---

A Change of Heart

---

Peter Thiel hasn't always had this stance however, as recently as 2014, he was quoted mentioning:

Thiel had expressed that he was not optimistic bitcoin could achieve mainstream adoption until it was “used to make more legal transactions”

Since then, after watching the advancements and growth in Bitcoin, he seems to have a change of heart.

Even with this stance on Bitcoins, Peter Thiel is still rather skeptical about cryptocurrencies in general however.