Peter Thiel: Bitcoin is akin to a reserve currency, and critics don’t understand it enough

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, recently expressed his views on Bitcoin again:

“Those who criticize Bitcoin do not fully understand the cryptocurrency.”

Peter Thiel made this statement on the third day of the Saudi Arabian Financial Investment Initiative Summit. Although he is skeptical about most cryptocurrencies, he believes that Bitcoin will have a bright future if it can take a good forward trajectory.

"People who are critical of Bitcoin are missing the point," Thiel said in an interview with Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo. "It's like a reserve currency. It's like gold. It's a store of value. You don't need to use it as a method of payment."

He went on to say:

“If Bitcoin can eventually become a network comparable to gold, then it has a lot of potential.”

Thiel has previously said that Bitcoin cannot be a good payment method. As early as 2014, Thiel mentioned in an AMA dialogue event that Bitcoin's payment system was seriously lacking support, but he was reluctant to express a more optimistic view at the time.

“I’ll be more bullish on Bitcoin when I see payment volumes actually increase in Bitcoin,” he said.

Thiel also mentioned that the energy-intensive process of mining Bitcoin is more difficult than mining gold.

“Bitcoin mining is like gold, it’s really hard to mine, in fact it’s harder to mine than gold. So in that sense it’s more restricted.”