Hedge fund legend Stanley Druckenmiller may have invested in a stablecoin, but that doesn’t mean he wants anything to do with Bitcoin.
Following an interview by Scott Bessent, another Soros alum, at the Economic Club of New York, Druckenmiller was asked what he thought about bitcoin, given that it’s – as the questioner put it – one of “the few asset classes that has done a better job rallying over the past few months than treasuries.”
“I look at bitcoin as a solution in search of a problem,” answered Druckenmiller, adding that he doesn’t “understand why we need this thing” and that the “stable cryptocurrency” to him is called the dollar.
Druckenmiller continued that if government policy remains sketchy, in five or 10 years he might just dabble into crypto, but at the moment, he just doesn’t need to be playing in Bitcoin. “I wouldn’t be short it; I wouldn’t be long it,” he said.
Why? Well:
“I don’t think I’m a neanderthal, which is what I’ve been called when I’ve said I didn’t want to own Bitcoin. You keep telling me it’s a store of value like gold, maybe I mean it could go to a million, but I don’t understand why it’s a store of value other than you can’t create it, but well there’s a lot of things you can’t create that aren’t gonna go to a million.
This isn’t the first time Druckenmiller publicly criticized Bitcoin: in an interview with CNBC last year, the former Quantum Fund CIO said that he doesn’t know much about it other than a) it’s “like anything else. It’s worth what people are willing to pay for it,” and b) “the concept it could ever be a medium of exchange has been eliminated because you can’t do transactions, particularly retail transactions, with this kind of volatility.”