Billionaire venture capitalist and bitcoin investor Tim Draper is sticking by his prediction that bitcoin will reach $250,000 by the end of 2022 or early 2023 despite the cryptocurrency’s wild swings in value and the turmoil around its environmentally unfriendly energy usage.
“I think I’m going to be right on this one,” Draper tells CNBC Make It.
Draper first made the bold price prediction back in 2018, at which time bitcoin was trading around $8,000, according to Coinbase.
“I’m either going to be really right or really wrong [but] I’m pretty sure that it’s going in that direction,” Draper says.
That’s because Draper believes the currency is going to be “much more in use by then.”
“Give it about a year and a half and retailers will all be on Opennode [a bitcoin payment processor], so everybody will accept bitcoin,” Draper predicts.
Currently only a few major companies accept bitcoin directly or indirectly through a third-party digital wallet app, including Microsoft, PayPal, Overstock, Whole Foods, Starbucks and Home Depot. And many experts see bitcoin as a store of value, like gold, rather than a currency.
“Then beyond that, I think [bitcoin] continues up because there are only 21 million of them,” says Draper. By virtue of its code, only 21 million bitcoin can be “mined.” So far, more than 18 million bitcoin are already in circulation.
Draper, 63, who built his fortune by making early investments in Twitter, Skype, Tesla and SpaceX (to name a few), wouldn’t share how much bitcoin he holds or whether he has invested in other cryptocurrencies.
Source: CNBC