Former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan settled his March wager that Bitcoin will hit $1 million in just 90 days while warning the public that he believes that hyperinflation is imminent.
Srinivasan said he decided to settle his bet early as a demonstration that the economy "could get much worse very quickly," according to a May 4 Crypto News report. He entered into the bet with Twitter user James Medlock who said he would bet anyone $1 million the U.S. does not enter hyperinflation.
“I just burned a million to tell you they're printing trillions,” Srinivasan said in a Twitter thread, according to Crypto News. "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 [Fed chair] Powell promises — but something much worse.”
Srinivasan referred to a number of past events to demonstrate how quickly national finances could be upended, the most recent being the two days it took following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank for the U.S. government to produce $200 billion, Crypto News reported.
He also noted it took two months following the discovery of the COVID-19 pandemic's patient zero before the U.S. instituted lockdowns, and it took two quarters from Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke's 2008 declaration that there would be a mild recession before the Global Financial Crisis was acknowledged, according to Crypto News.
"In each of these cases, too slow was being too late, and the thing is that right now, in the economy, many things are breaking at once," Srinivasan said in the Crypto News report.
He added the ongoing banking crisis in the U.S. and Europe is "not a financial crisis. It's a fiat crisis," according to Crypto News. He added that flooding an already stressed system experiencing high inflation with money will cause the crisis.
