Morgan Stanley CEO: Bitcoin Is Not Going Away

James Gorman shared his thoughts on Bitcoin today in a call, saying that the digital currency is not going away.

• Bitcoin is not a fad and is not going away, said Morgan Stanley chief executive officer James Gorman.
• Gorman hence refutes JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s recent remarks that, in his opinion, “Bitcoin is worthless.”
• But the Morgan Stanley head fails to realize that Bitcoin is the true innovation, not blockchain.

Morgan Stanley chief executive officer James Gorman has a neutral-to-positive view on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, Bloomberg reported.

Gorman realizes that Bitcoin will not die, contrary to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who recently reiterated his past skepticism of BTC. “It’s got no intrinsic value. And regulators are going to regulate the hell out of it,” Dimon said.

“I don’t think crypto is a fad. I don’t think it’s going to go away,” Gorman said on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts Thursday morning. “I don’t know what the value of Bitcoin should or shouldn’t be. But these things aren’t going away, and the blockchain technology supporting it is obviously very real and powerful.”

Like other executives in his line of business, Gorman believes in the fallacious argument “blockchain, not Bitcoin.”

Contrary to common assumptions, blockchain technology is not the ground-breaking innovation that Satoshi Nakamoto brought to the world. Without bitcoin, the currency, blockchain is rendered useless. As Parker Lewis articulates, the innovation is Bitcoin, not blockchain.

“Ultimately, a blockchain is only useful in the application of money because it is dependent on a native currency for security,” Lewis wrote. “Bitcoin represents the most secure blockchain by orders of magnitude. Because all other blockchains are competing for the same fundamental use case of money and because bitcoin’s network effects only continue to increase its security and liquidity advantage over the field, no other digital currency can compete with bitcoin.

Liquidity begets liquidity and monetary systems tend to one medium as a derivative function. Bitcoin’s security and liquidity obsoleted any other cryptocurrencies before they left the proverbial gates.”