Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon and Joe Weisenthal: The Crypto Critics Who Changed Their Minds

On 20 October 2026 Joe Weisenthal, co-host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, posted a headline in capital letters on X: "MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY." In that day's Odd Lots newsletter, written with Tracy Alloway, he explained. Back "maybe 10 years ago or so", he had "always laughed at the guys in suits" who said at conferences that Bitcoin was speculative but the "underlying blockchain technology" was exciting. "Now here in 2026," he wrote, "I increasingly have to admit that maybe those guys were right."

It was a small, hedged confession, but it joined a longer list. In 2017 some of the most powerful people in finance called Bitcoin a fraud, a bubble and a tool for money launderers. In October 2026 BlackRock, the world's largest money manager, runs the largest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, and JPMorgan Chase moves client dollars on a public blockchain. Each critic changed his mind about something different, and each still says some of what he said then.

What Weisenthal changed his mind about

A blockchain is a shared ledger, a record of who owns what kept in step on many computers so that no single company controls it: a share register of which every broker holds an identical copy. Bitcoin runs on the first one.

Weisenthal had decided that a blockchain had one real advantage, censorship resistance: money that no bank or payment company can block. Without that, he wrote, there were "plenty of centralized databases" that were faster and nearly free. The suits praising the technology on TV "seemed to hijack the cypherpunk spirit" that Bitcoin grew out of.

It is not his first turn. In November 2013, at Business Insider, he wrote a post titled "Bitcoin Is A Joke". Within weeks came "I'm Changing My Mind About Bitcoin".

Two things moved him. In 2024 Odd Lots interviewed Austin Campbell, a crypto industry veteran, who argued, in Weisenthal's summary, that banks' separate computer systems will never be merged into one, so a blockchain could at least be "a credibly neutral protocol upon which transactions take place".

The second was perpetual futures. An ordinary futures contract is a bet on a price that ends on a set date. A perpetual future, or perp, never expires; regular small payments between buyers and sellers keep it close to the real price, much like a contract for difference at a stockbroker. Perps were born in crypto, where traders used them to bet with borrowed money, and are now spreading to oil, gold and shares.

His example was Hyperliquid, a blockchain built for trading perps and managed by Hyperliquid Labs, whose co-founder and chief executive, Jeff Yan, had just been on Odd Lots. Outside firms such as Trade.xyz list perps on it for Brent crude, gold and the chipmaker SK Hynix. A blockchain, Weisenthal concluded, may serve as "a unifying platform for lots of different financial companies to do business", adding in brackets: "though as of yet, none of the legacy players are really doing it yet." The "blockchain not Bitcoin" crowd "might've had a point, and I shouldn't have laughed at them as readily as I did."

Neutral is a claim, not a fact. In March 2025, when a surge in a small token called JELLY threatened a fund run by the platform, Hyperliquid's validators, the operators who run the network, voted to delist it and settled positions at a price they set. "Let's stop pretending hyperliquid is decentralised," posted Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, the exchange that popularised perps. The day the column ran, the investigator ZachXBT reported that a laundering service, FreedomXMR, had moved more than $20 million from hacks and ransomware through Hyperliquid. He did not accuse Hyperliquid itself.

Larry Fink: from 'money laundering' to the biggest Bitcoin fund

On 13 October 2017, at a meeting of the Institute of International Finance, a global banking association, Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, said: "Bitcoin just shows you how much demand for money laundering there is in the world. That's all it is." CNBC's headline compressed it into "an index of money laundering", the phrase that stuck.

Fink was never against the technology. Ten days earlier, on Bloomberg TV, he had called himself "a big believer in the potential of what a cryptocurrency can do". In November 2022, after the collapse of the exchange FTX, in which BlackRock had put $24 million, he said most crypto firms "are not going to be around" but that "the next generation for markets and next generation for securities will be tokenization of securities", meaning shares and bonds recorded as blockchain tokens. He was one of the suits.

What changed was his view of Bitcoin. In June 2023 BlackRock applied to launch a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, or ETF: a fund that holds real bitcoin and trades on the stock market like a share. On 5 July 2023 Fink told Fox Business that "Bitcoin is an international asset", Fortune reported. The iShares Bitcoin Trust began trading on 11 January 2024. Six months later he told CNBC's Jim Cramer, "I was a skeptic, a proud skeptic," and called Bitcoin "digital gold" and a "legitimate" financial instrument, Cointelegraph reported. On 20 October 2026 the fund held $66.9 billion, according to iShares, which charges 0.25% a year.

He has not become a cheerleader. At the DealBook Summit on 3 December 2025 he called Bitcoin "an asset of fear" and said that "The bigger problem of Bitcoin is it is still heavily influenced by leveraged players", DL News reported. His 2026 letter to shareholders compares tokenization to the internet in 1996 and does not mention Bitcoin by name.

Jamie Dimon: the bank moved, the boss mostly did not

On 12 September 2017 Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, called Bitcoin "a fraud" and said he would fire any trader dealing in it "in a second", because "It's against our rules and they are stupid." On 9 January 2018 he told Fox Business he regretted "fraud", then said the very sentence Weisenthal used to laugh at: "The blockchain is real."

The bank followed the blockchain half. In February 2019 it announced JPM Coin, a dollar-backed token for moving money between corporate clients. In November 2025 its blockchain unit, Kinexys, opened a deposit token, JPMD, to institutional clients on Base, a public blockchain built by the exchange Coinbase. A deposit token is an ordinary bank deposit recorded on a blockchain so that it can move at any hour; unlike a stablecoin, a digital dollar issued by a crypto company, the money stays inside a regulated bank.

On Bitcoin, Dimon moved only as far as his customers. At JPMorgan's investor day on 19 May 2025 he said clients could buy it: "I defend your right to buy bitcoin." In the same speech he listed its uses as money laundering, "the sex trafficking, the terrorism".

What the critics got right

Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, called Bitcoin "a bubble" on CNBC on 19 September 2017. In May 2021, in an interview shown at CoinDesk's Consensus conference, he said he owned some. In November 2025 he told CNBC it was about 1% of his portfolio and that "It's not going to be a reserve currency for major countries because it can be tracked." Others never moved: Warren Buffett's "probably rat poison squared" and Paul Krugman's "Bitcoin Is Evil" still stand.

None of the four now calls Bitcoin a fraud or a joke. Fink changed his mind about Bitcoin, and his firm sells a fund that holds it. Dimon changed his mind about the technology and his clients' right to buy, not about the coin. Dalio holds a little. Weisenthal changed his mind about what a blockchain might be for, and put "maybe" in his headline.

None of them has withdrawn the warnings, because the warnings came true. In July 2017 US prosecutors charged BTC-e, an exchange they said had laundered $4 billion. In November 2022 FTX went from a $32 billion valuation to bankruptcy in nine days. On 15 October 2026 a Hyperliquid account belonging to the former Taiwanese pop star Jeffrey Huang, worth $12.25 million earlier in the month, was down to about $21,800 after the platform's computers sold out his losing bet. The critics now admire the same technology the scams ran on.