Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit (1995-1999) and PayPal (1999-2000), in a post for Recode, calls Bitcoin (BTC) a scam and “a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.”
In this article, Harris, who is the founder of online personal wealth management company Personal Capital, argues that “a bitcoin has no value at all” since it fails as a means of payment (very few places accept it, in addition to the problem of price volatility), it is not a good store of value (again, due to its extreme price volatility), and it lacks any intrinsic value.
He claims that the best use case scenario for cryptocurrencies is “criminal activity” since crypto transactions are harder for the authorities to investigate. He says that’s why Bitcoin’s heaviest users are criminals. To prove his point, he points out that crypto exchanges are not that safe, that many ICOs are scams, and that much of remote hacking involves cryptojacking.
Next, Harris explains that even the non-criminal portion of Bitcoin’s users are not that innocent since most of them don’t bother to report the sales of their bitcoins to the tax authorities.
He then moves on to complain about how slow and expensive it is to send someone bitcoin.
And, finally, as if all of that was not enough reason for him to dislike Bitcoin, he says that Bitcoin is “absurdly wasteful of natural resources” since the process that creates them — mining — is computationally expensive and requires a lot of electricity.
