And if his latest public appearance is any indicator, he's ready for war.

Specifically, war against the powerful old people at establishment financial institutions. At Miami's Bitcoin 2022 conference on Thursday, Thiel, age 54, kicked off his keynote speech—which you can watch for yourself here—with a clip of himself in 1999 ruminating about the future of cellphones, banks, and digital infrastructure. Then, the real Thiel took the stage and said he'd start his talk the same way he'd start investor pitches in PayPal's early days: ripping up several hundred dollars and negging onlookers for their naively shocked reactions at the guy who just ripped up several hundred dollars.

"Would the gentleman in the front row like to have the money?" He asked, crumpling the bills and tossing the wad to the front row. "I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists!"

Look, a few hundreds is pocket change to Peter Thiel. He's a multi-billionaire, meaning $100 amounts to .00001% of his wealth by a conservative estimate. But if that example of absolute Fiscal Alpha Maleness wasn't enough for you, don't worry, because things only got more combative from there.

After a brief and boring interlude of opining on Bitcoin and Ethereum, Thiel offered his thoughts on why crypto was lacking mainstream adoption. If you asked anyone else that same question, they'd likely offer opinions backed by tangible evidence: that the world's already buckling technological infrastructure can't support an energy-sucking Bitcoin wallet in every pocket, or that these currencies are too volatile to be useful for everyday transactions. But if you ask Peter Thiel, the lack of mainstream appreciation is the result of the utter failure, intentional ignorance, and desperate maneuvering of the world's banks.

"Bitcoin is the most honest market in the world. It's the most efficient market," Thiel said, "It is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt, that we are at the end of the fiat money regime."

According to Thiel, Bitcoin's slow adoption is also due to the fact that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is too ungrateful to the gods of digital finance to see the opportunities it presents.

"I think the central bankers—Mr. Powell, people like that—should be extremely grateful to Bitcoin," Thiel went on, "Because it's the last warning they're going to get. They've chosen to ignore it, and they will have to pay the consequences for that in the years ahead."