Ray Dalio has admitted he owns Bitcoin and says the greatest risk to the cryptocurrency is its own success.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates LP, revealed that he owns Bitcoin during the 2021 Consensus conference. The interview was conducted earlier this month and published by Coindesk.
Although Dalio has expressed skepticism about the leading cryptocurrency in the past, he now identifies as a Bitcoin investor. However, he warns that Bitcoin’s biggest risk is its popularity. If the cryptocurrency becomes widely successful, Dalio fears governments will try to control it—and that they have the power to do so.
“The more we save in BTC, the more you could say: ‘I prefer Bitcoin to a bond.’ Personally, I prefer Bitcoin to a government bond. And the more that happens, the more flows into Bitcoin instead of bonds, the more they (governments) lose control over it,” Dalio said.
The Bridgewater founder has made this point repeatedly. In January he said that if Bitcoin succeeds, governments might attempt to dismantle it. He suggested that governments may not fully appreciate the success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies right now.
Dalio reiterated the concern in March, warning that the U.S. government could move to ban Bitcoin. He referenced how the U.S. treated gold in the 1930s: if Bitcoin increasingly threatens government bonds as a competitor, authorities might try to prohibit it.
Many experts, however, argue that banning Bitcoin would be nearly impossible. They contend that because of the technology underlying the cryptocurrency and its decentralized nature, a wholesale ban would be technologically and practically infeasible.
Dalio concluded: “The world will change at an incredibly fast pace. Whoever wins the technology race wins everything, economically and militarily. That is how the next five years will look.”