Mark Yusko, the founder and the CEO of the North Carolina-based investment firm Morgan Creek Capital Management, which has $3.7 billion in assets under management, has said that Bitcoin price will reach $400,000 in the long-term.
After taking a steep dive, today’s Bitcoin price is at $6,718, with a market cap of $112 billion.
Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency formed by Satoshi Nakamoto first arrived on the scene in 2009, but it took Yusko a few years to get wise to the trend.
“I first heard about [Bitcoin] in late 2010 and 2011 when a friend of mine, Dan Morehead was starting up Pantera and some of our venture capital funds started paying around in this space,” Yusko said.
Yusko explained that back then he would come across Bitcoin occasionally, once every few months, and eventually he decided to make an investment. In hindsight he regrets choosing the “picks-and-shovels” option to invest.
“If you are in a gold rush, you have a choice you can go after the gold,” he said, noting that he had no assurance of momentum that Bitcoin would be a winner.
“We chose to invest in venture capital projects that went on to become Coinable,” he Yusko said. “It would have been better off if I had bought the coin [Bitcoin] itself.”
Bitcoin Will Be Disruptive
It is no secret banks and traditional financial institutions have been resistant to acknowledge cryptocurrencies. The most vocal on this investment type has been JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon who criticized Bitcoin and dubbed it a “fraud’ and “worse than tulip bulbs.”
Recently Saudi billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said that Bitcoin will “implode” and that he agrees with Dimon that Bitcoin is crock.
When asked why there are so many naysayers, Yusko noted he takes the reaction in stride.
“It is extremely natural to expect banks to be dismissive and sceptical because this [Blockchain and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin] is a disruptive technology,” he said. “This will change the supply and demand equation for banking. It is that big. I’m not surprised at all that bankers, financiers and Saudi Princes are coming out against it. This is a truly disruptive technology.”
Welcoming a Digital Revolution
Yusko foresees physical financial institutions as obsolete.
“If you think about it why do we need giant building to have a bank?” he said. “We don’t. We used to why do we have to have something in the first place. You had to have something where people felt safe putting their money in. Literally and physically putting their cash or valuable in a safe boxes where you had vaults and you kept money in.”
He explains money is digitized now.
“One of my greatest fears or nightmares is that I may wake up one morning and the bank says I have no money,” he said. “How would I prove that I do? I don’t have physical records anymore, I don’t have a statement that says you have X dollars. So I think Bitcoin and blockchain and Ethereum too – are exciting new technologies.”
The hedge fund manager explains that he has a high level of confidence that the genie is out of the bottle on blockchain and distributed ledger technology. He explains the internet of money is real and is as important as the internet itself was in the ’90s.
“Think about what has been disrupted by the internet over the past 30 years,” he said. “The same is going to happen with the internet of money. Now crypto is very different it is one form of application of blockchain technology. I am a huge fan of Bitcoin because it has survive the start-up phase ad emerged as the leader in the store of value basically like the digital gold.”
Yusko thinks Bitcon is here to stay.
“It will be very disruptive to banking and finance, payment systems, options, futures and any sort of electronic commerce,” he said. “That is going to go through a process of disruption.”
I’ll leave the price projections up to others, but this (blockchain) is a spectacular technology. The dotcom stocks were a “bubble” basically from 1995-March 2000.