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March 16, 2018, 05:35:42 AM |
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On Thursday, tech investor and Facebook boardmember Peter Thiel chatted with journalist Maria Bartiromo during a fireside chat at the Economic Club of New York. Thiel talked about a range of topics including the viability of cryptocurrencies, the results of the 2020 election if Trump were to run again, and Silicon Valley's insulated culture.
Thiel invested early in bitcoin, and said he's "long bitcoin, neutral to skeptical on everything else."
"I'm not exactly sure whether or not I would encourage people to turn out and buy these cryptocurrencies right now," he said.
In the future, Thiel predicted that there will be one prevailing cryptocurrency that will viewed as the digital equivalent of gold. "It will most likely be bitcoin," Thiel said, although he hinted at the possibility of ethereum.
Thiel seemed unswayed by the increasing speculation regarding what many feel to be the cryptocurrency bubble.
"Any of the objections most people would have to bitcoin are the same objections people would have had to gold," he said. "But money is a bubble that never pops ... and there is this bubble-like aspect to money that can be quite stable."
Thiel, who recently announced that he intends to move from his longtime home of Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, reiterated his thoughts that the tech hub has become the home of pervasively hermetic ideologies. More than once, Thiel described the valley's tech community as having a "lemming-like" quality which lacked diversity of thought.
"I thought it would be healthier to be somewhere outside [Silicon Valley]," Thiel said.
Thiel stressed the importance of investors considering the geographic expansion of the tech community, not only within the United States, but globally as well.
"This geographic question is something we should be thinking about super hard[...]" Thiel stated. "We're living in a very different world where we have to think about how we get American companies to compete globally."
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