Ray Dalio says that if Bitcoin is a real success, regulators will “kill” it

Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, believes that regulators would ultimately take control of Bitcoin if the cryptocurrency achieves overall success.

“I think at the end of the day, if he’s really successful, they’ll kill him and try to kill him. And I think they’ll kill him because they have ways to kill him,” Dalio told Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wednesday on CNBC’s Squawk Box “at the SALT conference in New York.

U.S. regulators have stepped up surveillance of the volatile space of cryptocurrencies while wild attractions in speculative markets continued to draw attention. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said Tuesday that Wall Street’s top regulator is working overtime to create a set of rules to protect investors by better regulating thousands of new digital assets and currencies.

Despite some intense episodes of volatility, Bitcoin has been quite successful in the end. Cryptography has quadrupled in the last 12 months and on Wednesday was around $ 47,500. It peaked above $ 60,000 earlier this year.

“You have El Salvador taking over and India and China are getting rid of it. And you have the United States talking about how to regulate it and it could still be controlled,” Dalio said.

In June, El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender. Meanwhile, India is expected to propose a law banning cryptocurrencies and penalizing miners and traders. China has begun cracking down on crypto markets, ordering miners to close their operations.

Dalio said that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, that is, the asset has no fundamental and objective value.

“There are so many things in a historical perspective that didn’t have an intrinsic value and they had perceived the value. And then it got hot and it got cold. It could be anyway. You just have to know what it is. It could be tulips in Holland.” , said Dalio.

Still, the billionaire investor said Bitcoin is a good alternative to cash and that it owns a smaller percentage of digital token compared to its exposure to gold in the portfolio.

“I think it’s worth considering all the alternatives to cash and all the alternatives to other financial assets. Bitcoin is a possibility. I have a certain amount of money in bitcoin,” Dalio said. “It’s an amazing success to have taken it from where this programming came to to where it is through the test of time.”