"It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen."

This is a contributed post by Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital.

In a pump-and-dump game, promoters “pump” up the price of a security creating a speculative frenzy, then “dump” some of their holdings at artificially high prices...The losers are ill-informed buyers caught up in the spiral of greed. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary families to internet promoters.

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Bill Harris (Author of piece)

"William H. Harris Jr. is the founder of Personal Capital Corporation, a digital wealth management firm that provides personal financial software and investment services, where he currently sits on the board of directors. Harris has founded several companies...he also served as CEO of PayPal Inc." (From 1999-2000, 1yr.)

From his LinkedIn

"Bill Harris is founder of Personal Capital and former CEO of Intuit and PayPal. With 25 years developing financial technology, he is busy dragging the financial industry into the 21st century. The nation’s first digital wealth management firm, Personal Capital gives people control over their financial lives."

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In response, Forbes:

First of all...Amazon Mechanical Turk workers who find it difficult to transfer value out of the system often turn to bitcoin by way of Purse.io.

Harris also discussed the efficiency issues...this sort of misses the point as the key value proposition here is censorship-resistant payments...

but the reality is there is also a fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin, which is as digital gold in an increasing cashless society...There are plenty of scams in the cryptoasset ecosystem...

(Forbes is unconvincing to say the least.)

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I personally think bitcoin is a conspiracy to subsidize the creation of massive data centers that will power the future digitized age that global technology and financial firms seem to be accelerating towards.