PayPal’s Peter Thiel: BTC Could Be Used As Chinese Financial Weapon

PayPal’s Peter Thiel spoke during a seminar on Big Tech and China and said that Bitcoin could become a Chinese financial weapon and that the approach China has towards crypto should really concern America as we can see in our latest Bitcoin news today.

PayPal’s Peter Thiel calls himself a pro-BTC maximalist and thinks that China has a strategic approach to BTC and its own digital yuan poses a threat to America. Thiel spoke at a virtual event for the Nixon Seminar and opined on how China is poised to win a financial arms race with the US and the country will use nothing else but Bitcoin:

“Even though I’m sort of a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist. I do wonder if at this point Bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S., where it threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar.”

“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.” says @Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel.

More on cryptocurrencies from The #NixonSeminar: pic.twitter.com/sIUQTQEWgr

— Richard Nixon Foundation (@nixonfoundation) April 7, 2021

Thiel wasn’t really talking about BTC but about China’s plans to create the digital yuan. The Moderator Hugh Hewitt wanted to know either the digital yuan is a threat to the dollar and how it will dominate the world markets. The real concern according to Thiel is BTC because it can serve as a functional reserve currency while the dollar is less dominant which means the American monetary and foreign policies will also be less effective:

“If China’s long Bitcoin, then perhaps from a geopolitical perspective the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works.”

The seminar titled “Big Tech And China: What Do We Need From Silicon Valley” included former secretary Mike Pompeo and former NSA Advisor Robert O’Brien. Pompeo agreed that the digital yuan will have a huge impact on China’s surveillance capacity but he asserted that the coin will allow it to make cross-border transactions that could evade US sanctions:

“They want to make sure that when Secretary Pompeo issues sanctions against the Iranian leadership, that there is a way to purchase Iranian oil.”

Thiel invested in plenty of crypto ventures like BTC mining company Layer1 Technologies and blockchain development platform Alchemy that we know of. Also, as reported recently, When it comes to developing a central bank currency, China is probably the most advanced country. While carrying out a few tests in the past months, the People’s Bank of China said that the interest in the new technologies is surging but BTC could also have a key role in this.