From Bitcoin Critics to Believers

The road from believing “crypto is a scam” to “Bitcoin is a legitimate asset class” is a long way to travel, fraught with many a twist and turn.

Yet against all the odds, a surprising number of high-profile skeptics have undertaken the journey unscathed and, perhaps more remarkably, without ever admitting they were wrong.

The very naysayers who once warned of a “crypto apocalypse” have begun preaching the virtues of blockchain rails and launching tokenized products of their own.

From Bitcoin exchange-traded funds to tokenized gold, here are five of the biggest crypto backflips.

Born-again crypto converts

Larry Fink: ‘Index of money laundering’ to ETF king

Larry Fink may be the archetypal born-again crypto convert. In 2017, the BlackRock chief executive cast Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering,” nicely capturing mainstream finance’s view at the time of a market they believed was dominated by wild speculation and dubious flows.

As a side note: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. While money laundering in crypto was estimated at $82 billion in 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that roughly $800 billion to $2 trillion is laundered the old fashioned way each year.

Related: BlackRock Bitcoin ETF sees near-record outflows as BTC dips below $75K

It’s not entirely clear why Fink decided to recalibrate but by 2020 he started acknowledging its potential, in 2023 he was actively defending BlackRock’s crypto push, and today BlackRock has become one of the most important institutional access points to Bitcoin via spot ETFs, helping pull the asset into the heart of the regulated investment universe.

In his annual shareholder letters, Fink now waxes lyrical about tokenization and writes impassioned OpEds about how it is set to transform the financial system.

Reluctant but will make money anyway

Jamie Dimon: still hates Bitcoin, loves the rails

If Fink is a born-again believer, Jamie Dimon sits squarely in the reluctant and still skeptical camp.

The JPMorgan chief has called Bitcoin a “fraud,” crypto investors “stupid,” and warned that BTC will blow up on more than one occasion, not to mention using Congressional hearings as a platform to reiterate his distaste for the asset.

But watch what he does, not what he says as JPMorgan has quietly become one of Wall Street’s biggest blockchain infrastructure providers.

The world’s largest bank has built out its Onyx division, rolled out JPM Coin, experimented with linking bank infrastructure to crypto wallets, and developed tokenized collateral platforms to move cash and securities around more efficiently.

Oh sure, Dimon still trashes Bitcoin in public, but JPMorgan now sells many of the rails that make institutional digital asset markets viable.

Peter Schiff: gold forever, but now onchain

Peter Schiff hasn’t softened his rhetoric as prices and adoption grow. If anything, each Bitcoin rally only amplifies his warnings about bubbles, “greater fools,” and inevitable collapse. It’s a highly effective form of advertising for Schiff’s beloved gold industry.

Peter Schiff’s infamous “greater fools” comment. Source: Peter Schiff

Yet even the perpetual goldbug has edged into the digital asset world by launching a tokenized gold platform, T-Gold.com, in December 2025, that uses blockchain to represent vaulted bullion as transferable tokens.

The product lets users buy physical gold and silver stored in segregated vaults and receive digital tokens representing specific quantities of the metals, with ownership recorded on a blockchain.

Related: Tucker Carlson presses Peter Schiff on Bitcoin as new global reserve currency

For Schiff, this is not apostasy but reinforcement: a way to tell crypto-native investors “you can keep the rails, but swap the asset for something with thousands of years of monetary history instead.”

Nouriel Roubini: Technodollars, not Bitcoin

Nouriel Roubini, once known in crypto circles as “Dr. Doom,” might seem like an unlikely candidate for any kind of crypto conversion.

He has spent years describing most digital assets as “useless,” warning of a “crypto apocalypse,” and cataloguing the sector’s governance failures, conflicts of interest, and investor harm.

Yet this week, he published a whitepaper co-authored with Atlas Capital and announced USAFi, a tokenized instrument marketed as a regulated permissionless security, designed to embody what he calls the “Technodollar.”

USAFi whitepaper. Source: Atlas AI Labs

Roubini insists this is “not a reversal,” telling Cointelegraph he “remains skeptical of unbacked crypto assets whose value depends primarily on speculation rather than fundamentals.”

The Technodollar, he argued, is about “modernizing the financial system through regulated, asset-backed digital instruments that can be trusted by institutions and individuals alike.”

He added that he still believes most crypto assets “suffer from excessive speculation, weak governance, conflicts of interest, and insufficient investor protections.”

Don’t understand it, but happy to cash in

Donald Trump: vibes over whitepapers

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Donald Trump belongs in a category of his own. The same politician who once said Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and warned that it could undermine dollar hegemony later rebranded himself as the “crypto president.”

Trump has flirted with nonfungible token drops, launched his own meme coin and one for his wife, and pitched himself as the defender of domestic crypto innovation against overreaching regulators (all while reportedly pocketing over $2.3 billion from his various crypto endeavors since 2024).

Trump promised to end Joe Biden’s war on crypto. Source: Vivek Ramaswamy

He may not be able to tell you the difference between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, but he does understand his constituencies.

Related: Trump crypto company’s USD1 stablecoins backing UFC event bonuses

The crypto industry has matured into an important voting bloc, and its donors are increasingly strategic. What matters is the ability to read a room full of HODLers and say the right words about freedom, innovation, and firing Gary Gensler.

What changed: faith, incentives, or both?

Born-again converts like Fink have reframed crypto and tokenization as extensions of their existing mission, encouraged by clear demand and the opportunity to graft new fee streams onto enormous asset management franchises.

The reluctant skeptics, on the other hand, have tried to draw bright lines between “bad crypto” and “good digital finance,” and the opportunists, well, they’ve learned that even a shallow embrace of digital assets can unlock both support and riches.

Of course, whether these moves represent genuine intellectual evolution or a simple instinct to follow the money remains to be seen. But perhaps the bigger question is: which crypto skeptic will be the next to see the light? Is it too much to hope that Warren Buffett will review his famed opinion about Bitcoin that it is “rat poison squared?”

Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt