Peter Thiel Says China Could Use Bitcoin as ‘Financial Weapon’ Against the U.S.

Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel said Wednesday that bitcoin could serve as a “financial weapon” for China if it’s holding it as a long-term investment.

“Even though I’m a pro-crypto, pro-bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether if at this point bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.,” Thiel said as part of a roundtable event for the Richard Nixon Foundation, where he was joined by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar, and China wants to do things to weaken it, so it’s sort of long bitcoin,” he added. “And perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works.”

Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1999, leaving it as a billionaire in 2002. His San Francisco-based venture capital firm, Founders Fund, began investing in bitcoin in 2018

He also said that a new digital version of the yuan unveiled by the China this year — which allows the country’s government to monitor where citizens spend their money in real time — didn’t qualify as a cryptocurrency in the traditional sense.

“Some sort of internal stablecoin in China — that’s not a real cryptocurrency,” Thiel said. “That’s just some sort of totalitarian measuring device.”

Watch above via the Richard Nixon Foundation.