- Ray Dalio has reiterated his claim that the U.S. government could outlaw Bitcoin
- Dalio told the We Study Billionaires podcast that the government could emulate prior attacks on gold and silver ownership
- Taking such an approach to Bitcoin would likely backfire
Ray Dalio has warned that the government could outlaw Bitcoin, pointing to the government’s previous attempts to outlaw private ownership of gold and silver. Dalio, who has said that he owns some Bitcoin for diversification reasons, reiterated a warning he gave in September that if Bitcoin gets “too big” the government could take action against it, although the form this action would take would be critical to its chances of success.
Government Could Repeat Executive Order 6012
Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, was speaking on the We Study Billionaires podcast series about how to invest during a “changing world order” when the subject of Bitcoin naturally came up. Dalio pointed to how the U.S. government has in the past “outlawed gold and they’ve outlawed silver and so on” and that they could try to “outlaw bitcoin” in the same manner.
This references the famous Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.”
Prohibitive Tax More Likely Than Complete Bitcoin Ban
Dalio didn’t go into details of what form this outlawing could take, but it is unlikely to be in the same format as Executive Order 6102 as this would be almost impossible to enforce given the ease with which Bitcoin can be stored and moved around.
It is more likely that Dalio was referring to a call he made in September last year when he suggested that the government could essentially cripple public trading and usage of Bitcoin by putting an exorbitantly high tax on Bitcoin transactions. This, however, would only lead to its usage going back underground again and would not solve whatever problems the U.S. government has with Bitcoin.
