In a recent discussion with Morgan Creek Digital Partner Anthony Pompliano, Social Capital CEO and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya asserted that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) will either reach “millions,” or go to “zero.”
For Palihapitiya, the question of whether Bitcoin succeeds will be determined by whether the architects of the existing financial system continue on the current path toward debasement.
BTC price will either go to the moon or the gutter
Palihapitiya asserts that his case for BTC gaining over 100x from its current price rests on deteriorating public confidence in the dominant financial apparatus and money commodities.
“The path dependence for Bitcoin is if it looks like [debasement] is likely, it will really emerge as a flight to safety,” he states, adding of the existing financial system:
“We are driving, slowly, but we are driving towards a cliff. And then, we’re going to drive much, much faster down that cliff or down that hill. And at the end of it is a huge brick wall.”
Palihapitiya’s lofty price predictions are for the much longer term, with the former Facebook executing warning that there is ”a real chance that by 2030 we don’t find a way to inflate our way out of [crisis].” He continued:
“The only way to break the back of inflation is essentially to create some quasi form of a gold standard, but it’ll be almost impossible to do that between governments and central banks. They’ll never agree on an instrument and they’ll never agree on an exchange [rate]. But then, bottoms up, people could decide to do it [with Bitcoin].”
Cryptocurrencies are “too speculative” to supersede fiat
Palihapitiya dismissed the notion that Bitcoin could come to replace fiat currencies as a globally dominant means of exchange any time soon, asserting that Bitcoin is “too speculative for it to be reliable.”
“If you’re going to make the case that it should replace fiat currency, one thing you have to look at is the volatility of the U.S. dollar. You can’t replace it with something that’s nine sigma more volatile. It doesn’t work.”
The Social Capital CEO argued that the volatility of Bitcoin has pushed it into a “ghetto of day traders and speculators, right now, that’s where we are. We’re in that ghetto.”
Palihapitiya likens BTC to ‘hurricane insurance’
Amid the aftermath from the record crash of March 12 - 13 that saw the price of Bitcoin fall by 50% over less than two days, Palihapitiya took to Twitter to describe BTC as half-priced “hurricane insurance.”