In a new interview, Bitcoin investor and ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees predicts that Bitcoin will soar as high as $200,000 in 2020.
He also addresses why everyone is so consumed by speculation and Bitcoin’s price, which often appears to get more attention than the technology and the emerging use cases.
Voorhees tells YouTuber Crypto Beadles,
“It’s what brings people in. It’s what brought me in. I saw this article about Bitcoin and saw how it had gone up like 500% in a few months. Having known nothing about it, I clicked on the article because that sounded interesting.”
“Nothing has grown as fast in value as Bitcoin with the exception of a few private companies but they didn’t have their price ticker public from the very start. Imagine if Facebook’s share value was public and live in real time from the very first day that it got started. It would have been a fascinating assent. So yeah, it gets a lot of people interested. It pulls people in.
A lot of people only care about the price and that’s not the purpose. The price goes up because of the meaning behind it. Why is it rising? It’s because crypto is actually an amazing technology that’s changing how finance works around the world, and that’s far more interesting than the daily ups and downs – but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t exciting when it’s rocketing up.”
His latest price prediction pushes Bitcoin into the stratosphere as the next bubble, he believes, starts to grow.
“I think we’re in the next bubble, at this point. We’re starting the next bubble, and I think this bubble ends between $100,000 to $200,000 per Bitcoin sometime in 2020. That’s what I would predict. But markets are great at making fools of people so we will see what actually happens.”
Having been in the market for over eight years, Voorhees has a long lens on how outlandish a 20x prediction within such a short time period can sound.
“I remember debating with people on the internet forums back in 2011 — could Bitcoin ever be worth $100? We’d have these ferocious debates about it. What that would take, how much adoption, how realistic that was. And then the really crazy ones said maybe it will get to $1,000. And it didn’t take that long. It felt like a long time in the process but here we are. It’s eight years later and we’re at $12,000 a Bitcoin. Totally crazy.”
Voorhees says adoption happens because people want to spend their Bitcoin wealth on real things.
“You can talk to the BitPays of the world, the merchant processors. You can talk to people that have crypto — they generally spend it most when it’s mooning, because they’re becoming wealthier. and because they want to use some of that wealth to buy real things.
Bitcoin ultimately is only useful because some day it will buy something, whether that’s tomorrow or 50 years from now. So at some point, you convert bitcoins into real things that you want to consume like a house or food or a car or entertainment or whatever. And when it’s mooning, that’s when people feel that wealth effect and when they actually do a lot of their spending with crypto.”
Voorhies says Bitcoin will become increasingly stable as the network gets bigger, and that he can imagine people wanting to collect their salaries in the digital currency rather than holding it in a fiat currency that can be debased.
“Twenty years from now I don’t think [Bitcoin] will be that volatile. I think it’ll be less volatile than gold is today.”
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