PayPal co-founder, billionaire and investor Peter Thiel speculated that bitcoin could become a financial weapon in the hands of China, which uses digital currency to topple the dominant status of the US dollar on the global stage.

Speaking with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a virtual roundtable hosted by the Richard Nixon Foundation, prominent American investor Peter Thiel suggested that China could use cryptocurrency to reduce the role of the US dollar on the global stage as a reserve currency.

“Even though I’m a pro-crypto, pro-bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether if at this point bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S. … it threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the dollar.”

The danger of China and its confrontation with the United States is one of the favorite topics of Peter Thiel. In 2019, speaking at the National Conference on Conservatism in Washington, Thiel criticized the policies of Alphabet (Google's holding company) and said that Google's "treacherous" ties with Chinese intelligence should be investigated by the FBI and CIA.

“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI (artificial intelligence)?” Thiel reportedly asked. “Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?”

He said those questions “need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA.”