Each year, Bitcoin continues to grow in stature. Bitcoin is going mainstream by every metric — financial value, adoption rates, transaction volume, you name it.
But not everyone’s happy Bitcoin adoption is growing[1]. In particular, the banking industry feels threatened by bitcoin’s rise and continues to wage war on the cryptocurrency.
That banks don’t like Bitcoin shouldn’t be a surprise. Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention is the greatest disruption to the age-old monetary system in decades. As a peer-to-peer network for creating and exchanging value, Bitcoin may render banks useless.
To protect their position, banking institutions have resorted to the classic tool of warfare: propaganda. By spreading misinformation, banks hope to discredit Bitcoin — reducing public adoption and encouraging stricter regulation.
A (Brief) History Of Big Finance’s Propaganda War On Bitcoin
From the onset, Big Finance must have realized Bitcoin could potentially disrupt the banking system. But they chose to believe its use would remain restricted to drug dealers[2], computer geeks, cypherpunks, libertarians and other fringe elements.
But as cryptocurrency adoption grew, especially among institutional investors, panic spread in the banking system. For the first time, the possibility that this “magic internet money” may displace banks was real.
Thus, banks launched a coordinated effort to discredit cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was and is a favorite target, given its status as the world’s first and most popular cryptocurrency.
In 2014, Jamie Dimon, billionaire President and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, declared Bitcoin “a terrible store of value”[3] at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. However, that didn’t stop the state of New York from issuing licenses to Bitcoin exchanges[4] the following year.
