Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ascribed bitcoin’s recent meteoric appreciation to the eventual but inevitable obsolescence of banks.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has claimed that the recent spikes in bitcoin’s price are related to the fact that banks will eventually go the way of the dinosaur.
The head of state appears on a youtube video, which was posted on December 12, pondering in Hebrew, “Is the fate of banks that they will eventually disappear? Yes. The answer is yes.” He continued: “Does it need to happen tomorrow? And do we need to do it through Bitcoin? That’s a question mark.”
The clip shows him discussing the function that banks serve, which he says is to act as middlemen and to protect their customers by offsetting risks and preventing theft. While the PM does not claim to know what mechanism or institution will eventually make the banks obsolete, he appears confident that “the truth behind what I just said is what’s propelling bitcoin upwards.”
However, Netanyahu anticipates that the digital asset’s climbing value will soon level off, if not change directions: “There’s nothing like this, that will continue rising at this rate, it can’t happen.”