Well this is a weird mish-mash of contradiction...

JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, recently said he was a “major skeptic of crypto tokens [...] like Bitcoin” and called them “decentralized ponzi schemes.”

But JPMorgan allow their customers buy/trade Bitcoin & Ethereum - and they even have their own stablecoin 'JPM Coin.' Also, Dimon recently wrote in a shareholder letter that:

"Decentralized finance and blockchain are real, new technologies that can be deployed in both public and private fashion, permissioned or not."

...so what gives?

It seems like J-Di has an approach to cryptocurrency, similar to the one we have to liver pâté (aka coarsely ground pork liver and lard):

'Yuh. Ummm...not for me, but if you like it, you can have it.'

And to be fair, his whole 'Bitcoin is backed by nothing' argument is kind of true. At the end of the day, Bitcoin is valuable because others believe it's valuable...

But so are most global currencies (including the US dollar).

Gone are the days where, by law, every single dollar printed had to be backed by $1 worth of gold.

The thing that gets most people excited about Bitcoin is that no more than 21 million of them can be created, compared to most/all global currencies that can be printed infinitely.

And that infinite printing is a large reason as to why we're seeing massive inflation around the world...

The dollars in our bank accounts became less scarce/valuable as governments printed more money to stabilize their economies during the pandemic.

(That can't happen with BTC).

So yeah, it is in many ways a game of belief - but Bitcoin has some attributes that give it an unfair advantage on the playing field.