Former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, infamously known as the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ called Bitcoin (TIKER: BTC.EXANTE) a fraud, CoinDesk reports.
Belfort said that “the biggest problem I see from Bitcoin, and why I would never buy it, is because they can easily steal it from you through hacking. I know people who lost all their money like that.”
In an interview with The Street ye was asked to comment on the JP Morgan (TIKER: JPM.NYSE) CEO Jamie Dimon recent remarks regarding Bitcoin being “a fraud” and Belfort replied: “I think he’s right, I don’t think that it is a great model.”
“Currency is always air I guess, when you think about it…But this is specifically being backed by nothing other than a program that creates artificial scarcity. It seems bizarre to me that it can ever really be sustainable. Sooner or later, a central bank or a consortium is going to introduce their own cryptocurrency and that is what’s going to take hold,” the former Wall Street broker stated.
Belfort, now an author and motivational speaker, plead guilty to stock market fraud in 1999 and spent 22 months in prison as a part of his plea agreement.
Belfrot’s memoir ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ was adapted into a Hollywood movie directed by Martin Scorsese in 2013.