Balaji ends Bitcoin Bet with $1.5 million in donations, including $500K for Bitcoin Core Development
Balaji Srinivasan said on Tuesday that his $1 million bet on bitcoin (BTC) has been closed in advance and that he has donated $1.5 million ($500,000 more than needed) to three different entities as settlement.
The former chief technology officer at crypto exchange Coinbase and a former partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Srinivasan said in mid-March – shortly after the failures in short order of Silvergate Bank, Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank – that he expected a banking crisis to trigger a significant devaluation of the US dollar, hyperinflation and a rise in bitcoin to $1 million by mid-June. He put up $1 million to back up his prediction.
“I just burned a million to tell you they’re printing trillions,” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. “I spent my own money sending a demonstrably expensive signal that there is something wrong with the economy and that there is not going to be a ‘soft landing’ like [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome] Powell promises – but something much worse.”
He noted that current US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was at the Federal Reserve ahead of the 2008 global financial crisis and failed to sound any alarms, nor did then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Today’s crop of leaders, Powell among them, are similarly in denial, Srinivasan argued.
Crises, he reminded, can move much faster than anyone imagines. Srinivasan claimed it took two days for the Fed to print $300 billion after the Silicon Valley Bank failure, two weeks for $500 billion to leave the banking system, two months to go from “patient zero” to national lockdown during COVID-19, two quarters to go from mild recession to financial crisis in 2008 and two years for the Soviet Union to go from superpower to collapse in 1991.
Others have a different interpretation of the $300 million growth in the Fed’s balance sheet after Silicon Valley Bank. Economist and former Fed employee Danielle DiMartino Booth argued at the time that the rapid jump was not money printing, but instead an increase in the Federal Reserve’s discount window and other loans from the nation’s banks.
To top off the $1 million effort, Srinivasan made three $500,000 donations, one to fund Bitcoin Core development at Chaincode Labs, one to Give Directly, and one to pseudonymous Twitter user James Medlock, who back in March offered to bet 1 million dollars that the United States would bet. do not experience hyperinflation.
Update (21:35 UTC, 2 May 2023): Adding comment from DiMartino Booth.
