27th May 2025 > > Naysayers.

tl;dr

Two vocal BTC-sceptics cannot hold back from embracing the crypto revolution.

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Nvidia earnings out today could put some direction into this flatlining market.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – J.P. Morgan

CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, is famous for being a crypto-sceptic, threatening to fire any of the bank’s traders who made personal investments into BTC. That illiberal attitude and ethos of his, embedded deep in his psyche, explains perfectly his antipathy towards cryptos.

In September 2017 Dimon called BTC a “fraud”. In 2018, he called BTC a “scam”. He elaborated further on his personal embrace of illiberalism:

“(Dimon suggested) … governments may move to shut down the currencies [cryptocurrency], because of an inability to control them.”

There it is in black and white; the control freak’s fear of a tool that can be used to enhance our personal independence, freedom, and privacy.

Dimon qualified his comments a little when praising blockchain technology. However, despite his obvious natural intellect he still didn’t get it – J.P. Morgan set about building its own private blockchain for use by its clients. Though private blockchains have many administrative and efficiency advantages over old-school databases, they are still merely just that – a form of database. Making blockchains public, removing the need for trust and relying on the ability to verify the data is the revolutionary part of blockchain technology.

Doubling back down, Dimon showed in 2023 that his research on this topic continued to be paper thin:

“I’ve always been deeply opposed to crypto, Bitcoin, etc. The only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering, tax avoidance.”

Next thing we know, he will be telling us about the supposed carbon footprint of mining for BTC.

And this one again:

“If I were the government, I’d close it down.”

…

During investor day at the bank on May 19th, Dimon announced that the bank’s clients would be allowed to buy spot BTC ETFs. That’s $6 TRILLION of assets that can now gain exposure to BTC. That will bring in $180-$300 billion of new money into BTC alone, and you can be sure that this offer will be taken up.

Even Vanguard will have to offer its clients access to spot BTC ETFs one day soon.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Vanguard

Eric Balchunas, ETF analyst at Bloomberg who is often ahead of the news when it comes to spot BTC ETFs, has this to say:

I might also point out that now COIN is in the S&P 500 and MSTR looks to be heading that way, one of the giants of the ETF industry, VOO (a passive tracker of the S&P 500), offers indirect exposure to BTC with $660 billion AUM.

VOO is – of course – Vanguard’s leading ETF.