Billionaire David Rubenstein says that crypto investors are essentially playing at casinos and that he’s identified the motivation behind it.
In a new interview on crypto influencer Anthony Pompliano’s YouTube channel, the Bloomberg host says that traders are choosing to buy crypto assets because they are trusting governments and fiat currencies less.
“I used to say that if you would go to Las Vegas and you like gambling there, [if] it gives you a form of happiness and pleasure knowing that you’re going to lose the money in the end if stay there long enough because the odds are always in favor of the house, go ahead and do it, but don’t lose more money than you can afford to lose.
Put one or two or three percent in, if it gives you pleasure, fine. I used to say the same thing about cryptocurrencies, if you want to speculate, you want to read about all the things going on there, you like the thrill of cryptocurrencies, okay, put one or two or three percent in.
Today, what I clearly think is going on is that more and more people are doing more than one or two or three percent and that reason is [because] people have less confidence in governments generally and their currency is being devalued, so they think that cryptocurrencies won’t be devalued quite that way.”
Rubenstein goes on to say that investors, particularly the wealthy, may enjoy the financial confidentiality that owning crypto assets could provide.
“There’s a lot of thrill in the secrecy of it, a lot of thrill that nobody knows what you actually own, a lot of Russian oligarchs saw their assets being taken away by Western governments and many other wealthy people around the world are probably saying, ‘well I want to have some assets that nobody can confiscate, nobody knows that I have [them],’ and that’s what cryptocurrencies do.”
