It’s no real secret by now that after bitcoin’s disastrous year in 2018, the general consensus is that things are probably going to get worse for the world’s largest cryptocurrency before they get better.
The question now for investors is, how much worse?
Jeff Schumacher, founder of BCG Digital Ventures and a leading investor in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, has a very distressing answer: Zero. And no, that’s not a misprint.
Schumacher made his dire prediction during a CNBC-hosted debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“I do believe it will go to zero,” he said, according to CNBC. “I think it’s a great technology but I don’t believe it’s a currency. It’s not based on anything,”
Schumacher was joined by 500 Startups Partner Edith Yeung, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple and Glenn Hutchins, chairman of North Island. All of them appear to be much more interested in the possibilities presented by the underlying blockchain technology powering bitcoin, rather than in bitcoin itself.
Per CNBC:
“It might be that the role of bitcoin in the system could be to bring value back, to hold your value there while you have tokens that have other use cases that you aren’t using at the moment,” Hutchins said.
He added, as did the other panelists, including 500 Startups Partner Edith Yeung, and Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, that the focus for him as an investor is on the underlying technology known as blockchain.
“I am much less interested in investing around bitcoin as a currency unit or a currency equivalent, or even the blockchain as an accounting ledger. I am thinking much more about the protocols. In other words, what is the underlying protocol going to do as a consequence of which, which tokens are valuable or not,” Hutchins said.
This is not too different an assessment as that offered by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon – one of bitcoin’s harshest critics – who despite calling bitcoin “a fraud,” has also said that he remains optimistic about blockchain’s potential. Bitcoin was trading at roughly $3, 550 on Wednesday evening in New York, according to data from Coinbase.
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