Bitcoin is the best form of money and will be the base layer of the internet of value, said Mark Yusko, CEO of Morgan Creek Capital, in an interview with Cointelegraph. Yusko shared his thoughts on Bitcoin, gold, cryptocurrencies, and the barriers to worldwide adoption.
Bitcoin will eat all of gold’s market cap, in Yusko’s opinion, driving the BTC price north of $500,000. But in the short term, bitcoin is set to increase five-fold as it draws in the “liquid” supply of gold, which is valued at around $4 trillion. As a result, Yusko explained, BTC could be worth $250,000 within the next couple of years.
“Financial services is far bigger than information and media and commerce,” he said, referring to the massive market that Bitcoin could tap into as “the best form of money.” Yusko compared the “internet of value” to the internet, pointing out that it will be built in layers similar to its predecessor. “Bitcoin will be the base layer,” he said.
“You have TCP/IP, which we are using to communicate right now, and you have SMTP for email, HTTP for web,” Yusko explained in the interview. “And we will have it similarly in the internet of value.”
The hedge fund manager highlighted that Bitcoin would power the internet of value by being its “base layer,” but said “other things” would also play an important role. Yusko likened SMTP with Filecoin and HTTP with Ethereum. Besides file sharing and an application layer, Yusko opined that other tokens would also play a role. He cited gaming, earning, and paying for content.
Yusko fails to realize that nearly all of those use cases could be built on top of Lightning, and some already are. There are gaming options that leverage Lightning, like Zebedee and streaming money services such as Sphinx Chat.
Natively built on Bitcoin, Lightning extends the base layer to encompass a broader range of use cases while abiding by the same rules. Users get the assurance that they are transacting on the most secure and robust network available, which is not true when using the other projects Yusko cited.
Although not perfect, like all software, Lightning has an immense potential that is just starting to be tapped. With the activation of Taproot in November, the second-layer network will enjoy more flexibility and privacy, as the soft fork is set to enhance Bitcoin’s smart-contract capabilities and allow more complex transactions to “blend in” with the simpler ones.
The slowly but surely advancements of Bitcoin and its layers will obsolete nearly all “altcoins” by rendering their value propositions redundant. There is a need for interoperability, something that is core to the internet but would be impossible by having one blockchain per use case. In the internet, layers build on top of each other, which is only possible in finance if built on top of “the best form of money” — Bitcoin. That’s where Lightning and the applications built on top of it come in.