Billionaire Bill Miller calls Bitcoin ‘insurance’ against financial crisis
Founder of Miller Value Partners holds high percentage of net worth in bitcoin and the like
Bill Miller, the billionaire founder and chief investment officer of the American investment firm Miller Value Partners, said he considers bitcoin (BTC) as an “insurance policy against financial catastrophe.”
According to Miller, digital gold withstood the shock of the pandemic and would be able to overcome downturns, as it is not linked to the traditional financial system.
“Look at the money supply when the pandemic hit. When the Fed stepped in that pandemic and started gunning the money supply and bailing out the mortgage rates and the other people doing commercial papers and things like that, bitcoin functioned fine. There was no run on bitcoin. It was there,” Miller said in an interview with the author William Green.
“It went down a lot initially, but the system functioned without Fed and without any interference and everybody got their bitcoin and the price adjusted, and then when the bitcoiners and newer bitcoiners realised they would have had inflation down the road, bitcoin went through the roof,” he said adding that he believed bitcoin would “rally” again in the future.
Miller said he holds a high percentage of his net worth in bitcoin and related investments in major industry firms such as Silvergate Capital, which purchased Zuckerberg’s Diem and is about to launch a stablecoin, and Michael Saylor’s business intelligence provider, MicroStrategy, one of the main bitcoin investors.
He criticised Warren Buffett’s view on bitcoin, saying: “Buffett said it is not productive and I think, fair enough. But the objective of investing is not to own productive assets, the objective is to make money.”
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Stablecoins ‘are a risk’
However, talking about the recent crash of the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), Miller said stablecoins were a risk, urging more regulation on them, as they should be more “transparent”.
“Stablecoin are like the reserve fund, there is no backing from them and it’s worst because there is no Fed to bail them out, they are all decentralized finance on an algorithm. And that’s exactly what happened [with Terra]. They are opaque,” he said.
“There is nobody to bail them out. If you thought that it was a stablecoin, it’s not stable anymore, you lost your money.
“I think that’s the risk and the solution to that is to regulate it the same way you regulate money market funds. A lot of new regulation [came] after the financial crisis”.
