Vinny Lingham, a bitcoin entrepreneur who has advocated reasonable expectations of bitcoin, recently tweeted that bitcoin has a 2.5% chance of being worth $100,000 or a 0.25% chance of being worth $1 million. Lingham’s message offers a dose of level-headedness against those who have expectations of six- and seven-figure bitcoin values.
Lingham tweeted in response to Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, who was commenting on bitcoin’s likelihood of becoming a store of value. Ravikant said bitcoin will be a store of value when everyone accepts it as such. “Fundamental analysis is impossible,” he tweeted.
Lingham agreed with Ravikant in noting the 2.5% chance of bitcoin reaching $100,000.
Some agreed with him on Twitter while others got off on tangents about valuation calculations.
Stratospheric Projections
Lingham’s tweet stood in stark contrast to some recent projections about bitcoin’s price.
Analyst Kay Van-Petersen, who describes himself a skeptic of central banks, said at the end of May on CNBC he sees bitcoin topping $100,000 in 10 years. Van-Petersen said average daily volumes of foreign exchange trading over $5 trillion will drive cryptocurrencies to 10% of that figure, or $500 billion in daily trading, in 10 years. If bitcoin – conservatively – totals 35% of the cryptocurrency market share, daily bitcoin trading volumes would reach $175 billion.
Also in late May, Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo, a cryptocurrency exchange, and a member of PayPal’s board of directors, said at the Consensus 2017 conference in New York that price would hit $1 million in the next 10 years.
Jim Cramer, the U.S. TV investment commentator, recently said on his show, “Squawk on the Street,” that bitcoin’s price could hit $1 million because companies are looking to buy it to pay off cyber attacks. He said European banks are frantically trying to buy bitcoin for this purpose. The CNBC host was agreeing with a similar comment by Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget.
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Blodget, for his part, reasoned his $1 million prediction based on speculators wagering they had little to lose by owning bitcoin when they could possibly make a 10 to 1,000 times return on their investment.
Jeremy Liew, an early Snapchat investor, and Blockchain CEO Peter Smith predicted bitcoin prices will hit $500,000 by 2030.
Also read: Vinny Lingham: The curse of ‘Satoshi’s Choice’ — a bitcoin community mired in insult and emotion
Lingham Advises Restraint
Once again, Lingham is calling for restraint.
In February, in the midst of excitement about the possibility of the SEC approving a bitcoin exchange traded fund, Lingham blogged that it was too soon for the SEC to take such action. If the SEC approved the bitcoin ETF, it would unleash a bitcoin price bubble that would make it harder for the price to stabilize and become a widely accepted store of value.
Lingham wanted to warn people about the risks of excessive price appreciation. While bitcoin’s scarcity and value will drive the price over time, excess appreciation could deliver a boom-and-bust cycle, he said, which does not bode well for moving bitcoin from a commodity to a store of value.
In an April blog titled, “Satoshi’s Choice,” Lingham observed that the bitcoin community has failed to maintain a level attitude aimed at achieving the greater good for the community.
Satoshi made a choice, Lingham noted, to leave the bitcoin community to its own devices. He did this to give the community a gift, but one that came with a curse. The more the community loves bitcoin, the more greed emerged within the community and outside of it.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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