Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, and a long-time market forecaster, said that when it comes to bitcoin, investors can’t see any wrong in the cryptocurrency, and predicted its value will ultimately be erased.
“No matter how high it goes, they’re never going to sell,” said Schiff in an interview that appeared in TheStreet. “Ultimately, I think bitcoin has really no value. In the market, it has plenty of value. As long as there’s buying, there’s value. But when the buying goes away, so does the value.”
The comments came last week, as bitcoin was trading at around $15,000 down from a peak of nearly $19,700, but up 1,400 percent from the beginning of the year, when it was trading at around $1,000.
Cameron Winklevoss, one of the twins that reportedly became the first billionaire bitcoin investors, is predicting that the widely popular and ever-volatile cryptocurrency will move even higher. In an interview with CNBC late last week, Winklevoss claimed that bitcoin disrupts gold.
“Gold is scarce, bitcoin is actually fixed. Bitcoin is way more portable and way more divisible,” Winklevoss said. “At a $300 billion market cap, it’s certainly seen a lot of price appreciation, but gold is at $6 trillion, and if bitcoin disrupting gold is true and it plays out … then you can see 10 to 20 times appreciation because there is a significant delta still. Long-term, directionally, it is a multi-trillion-dollar asset – I don’t know how long it takes to get there.”
At the same time that Winklevoss is pounding the table on the future prospects of bitcoin, many financial heads think it’s a bubble. In one famous example, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, called bitcoin a “fraud,” and others have similarly spoken out against the cryptocurrency.
Still, Winklevoss disagrees, telling CNBC that it’s not the right way to look at cryptocurrency. “Social networks grow in value exponentially based on the number of users and participants,” he pointed out. “The difference between one and 100 is dramatic – 100 and one million is that much more dramatic and exciting. As more people join, it gains more value.”