Wences Casares has got Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and countless other tech luminaries into bitcoin at gatherings of the rich and famous in Sun Valley and elsewhere. As the CEO of bitcoin wallet Xapo and member of PayPal’s board of directors he has just made a compelling forecast on bitcoin’s value over the next decade.
The bitcoin entrepreneur and executive was speaking at the Consensus 2017 conference in New York. Taking the stage at a dinner organized by bitcoin and blockchain advocacy group Coin Center, Casares’ speech was quite the hit.
The formula, according to Casares? Take 1% or less of what you own, buy bitcoin with it, and then forget about it for at least the next five years; ideally the next decade. “You either lose one percent of your net worth, which most people can take, or you make millions,” he told a room of cryptocurrency advocates at the Westin in Times Square.
Casares pegs the odds of bitcoin failing completely and going to zero dollars at 20%. “If it fails, it will be worthless,” he says. “If it succeeds, in five to seven years it [one bitcoin] will be worth more than a million dollars.” He puts the chances of success at greater than 50%.
Putting bitcoin under the spotlight, Casares opined that “the internet doesn’t have a currency and it desperately needs one”, pointing to the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
“The biggest mistake [would] be to buy more bitcoin than you can afford to lose. The biggest mistake is [also] not to own any bitcoin,” he told the gathered audience.
“Put 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin and forget about it for 10 years” Casares added, baiting new investors to adopt the cryptocurrency.
His speech also included a prediction for the cryptocurrency, where one bitcoin would hit $1 million before the next ten years.
A world where bitcoin is $1 million a coin will reflect its status as the world’s “meta currency” and a “global standard of settlement.” “The world used to have a global standard of settlement for 5,000 years and it was gold,” he says. “If you wanted to compare how much it cost Cleopatra to put together an army to how much it cost a Chinese emperor, it was straightforward. We don’t have that today.”
Casares’ claim is arguably among the most bullish predictions for bitcoin prices yet. Certainly more than early Snapchat investor Jeremy Liew and Blockchain CEO Peter Smith who predicted bitcoin prices to hit $500,000 by 2030.
It remains to be seen if either of these claims come true. One late 2016 prediction that has already proved right saw Danish investment bank Saxo predict bitcoin prices to rise by 165% (bitcoin was trading around $750 at the time), to leap beyond $2,000 in 2017. The price of Bitcoin broke above $2,300 yesterday and is continuing to move higher at the time of publishing.
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