- Balaji Srinivasan has bailed on his $1 million Bitcoin bet six weeks early
- Srinivasan had bet that Bitcoin would hit $1 million by mid-June
- His real goal was to raise awareness of the deepening financial crisis
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan has settled his famous $1 million Bitcoin bet and donated $1.5 million to three charitable entities after considering his point made. Srinivasan was discussing the devaluation of the US dollar in March when he made a wager that the price of Bitcoin would hit $1 million by the middle of June. However, with more than a month to go Srinivasan and his point about the economy seemingly taken on board he has closed out his bet, with three charities benefitting as a result.
$1 Million Bitcoin in 90 Days
Srinivasan grabbed headlines on March 17 when he famously predicted that the state of the US economy was giving him confidence that Bitcoin would outperform the collapsing fiat system, to the point where it could hit $1 million within 90 days. Srinivasan made the bet and plenty of people piled on both sides, seemingly not realizing that this was exactly what Srinivasan wanted; to bring attention to the damage he believed the US government was doing to the economy.
Six weeks after placing his bet, Srinivasan has revealed that he “settled the bet ahead of time and donated even more than I had committed” before expanding on his reasons for the bet:
I just burned a million to tell you they’re printing trillions. pic.twitter.com/pX5622rjUO
— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023
Srinivasan outlined his reasons in the tweet thread as well as in the video, leaving no one in any doubt as to his rationale:
The reason I did this was because I do believe in the public good, but unfortunately we can’t rely on the public sector anymore to tell us when something’s wrong […] So I spent my own money to send a provably costly signal that there’s something wrong with the economy, and that it’s not going to be a “soft landing” like Powell promises — but something much worse.
Of course, time will tell whether Bitcoin will hit one million dollars or the US economy collapses, or both, but one thing’s for sure – we can’t say we weren’t warned.
