Alex Tapscott on Why Bitcoin Won’t Stop Rising

Alex, Bitcoin has reached almost 13,000 today. It's the first time since December 2017. Do you expect it, it will run breaking the 20,000 high maximum point soon, or will we see bitcoin falling back soon again?

Well, I can't be sure one way or the other, but I think there are a lot of reasons why this rally that we're experiencing right now has a lot of legs and why it could go a lot higher. The first thing is that we're coming off of a cyclical low where Bitcoin hit a price of around $3,200 from a high of about 19,000. Now that drawdown from peak to trough is one of the most severe that we've ever seen. So the price right now is kind of like a beach ball that's been held underwater and it's been pressed down and pressed down and as it gets released it starts to move quite violently. So I think just based on that cyclicality, there's a lot more room to run. But, but there's some very specific reasons why I think the price could continue to go higher. The first is that we're now less than a year away from the next halving. So that's when the mining reward gets cut in half for miners, which means that there will be a smaller or lower supply growth, which means that there potentially could be greater demand based on what's available in supply. The second reason is that more recently in the news we've seen governments announcing basically never ending quantitative easing. So effectively they're planning on cutting interest rates and potentially putting themselves in a currency war against others in order to make their exports more competitive and make their economies more stimulated. Now we've seen gold, which I think is a decent proxy for Bitcoin, breaking out of a six year trend line and Bitcoin obviously following along suit. And then the most recent thing is this announcement by Facebook that they're launching their own cryptocurrency, Libra. Now I don't think Libra and Bitcoin are competitors with one another. I think they're very different. Libra as a permissioned system that exists inside of a corporate ecosystem, Bitcoin is a permissionless cryptocurrency that can be used by anyone, but I think what Libra will do and what it's helped to get people to realize basically is that there's a lot of enterprise interest in this. And as more and more big companies create on ramps into this digital asset ecosystem, they are potentially bringing on board billions of new customers. So if you've got 2.4 billion Facebook customers who have access to wallets where they can buy and sell Libra, that means they could also potentially buy and sell Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. And so you're going to go from 50 million billions of people who are finally going to be in this ecosystem. And I think that's a catalyst which will continue to drive the price higher. So there's a lot of good things happening right now. There's a lot of reasons to be bullish. And the most interesting thing actually is that interest from retail hasn't really moved at all during this entire rally. If you look at Google search results for buy Bitcoin, it's moved slightly up, but compared to the last cycle, it's barely moved at all. What we're seeing is a lot of the buying coming from institutions, high net worths, crypto asset funds and people who are more familiar with the asset class. We haven't seen are more traditional vanilla style investors. I think as that group moves into the space, we'll begin to see the rally sustain itself.

I want you to comment on another statement that was made recently by Eric voorhees, the ShapeShift CEO. He said that as you said, we are seeing an increase in the adoption of Bitcoin. It's getting more and more mainstream. But that's accompanied by another factor which is the network will get congested and fees will go up, according to Eric Voras. So what do you think about this issue? Is it a problem?

Well, I'm not sure that it's a problem for price. I think that there's enough demand for Bitcoin as a store of value that network fees are actually not really an issue. But I think if you want to see Bitcoin succeed as both the form of digital gold and as a global payment system, then you do need to resolve this issue. And I think that's probably going to be an inhibitor towards mainstream growth as a payment tool rather than just as a store of value. But there are obviously potential solutions to that. The lightning network, which has scaled significantly during this bear market, that's what's very interesting obviously is when you see tons of growth and development and building happening during periods when people aren't paying attention to price, so that when the market turns, there actually is greater capacity. And I think bitcoin still has the deepest technical teams working on it today and they're solving a lot of these problems. But I do agree that it's an issue and if it's not solved, it will mean that bitcoin won't reach its full potential. Though I still think there's enough potential for the price to go higher.

We registered a clear dominance of Bitcoin. Over 60% of the market is dominated by bitcoin. Why do you think other altcoins are struggling compared to Bitcoin?

Well, I think bitcoin is sucking the oxygen out of the room for one. So there isn't really a lot of demand yet for a lot of these so called altcoins. And generally speaking, in the early stages of a rally, people tend to buy the leader and not the laggard. So you buy the largest, most liquid, most mature asset within each category. And you can see that with bitcoin versus altcoins and you can see it right now with gold versus silver. Right? Silver is not doing that much, but gold is. But typically what happens over time, especially in the crypto market, is that as bitcoin prices increase, people have a wealth effect where all of a sudden their holdings are worth a lot more and they're looking to rotate down market into things that are smaller, that could potentially perform as well as bitcoin had in the past. Now I'm not sure that that's going to happen for every single altcoin. So if you're a bag holder and you're sitting on some random altcoin, I'm not suggesting it's going to go higher. I think this time around, because the market's more mature and because there's more value that you can actually identify in each of these different crypto ecosystems, I think that certain ones will outperform and others will not. I think there will be hundreds of thousands of alts that won't participate in any rally whatsoever. But I do think a few will because I do think that some of these alternative coins in these different crypto ecosystems have tons of value that has yet to be unlocked. And as a result the price will go a lot higher.

Can you mention a couple of those?

Well, I can say the ones that I think so, like Ethereum for example, has actually participated in this rally. So it bottomed at around 80 and it's now around 300. So in terms of a trough to where we are now, it's actually roughly the same. And litecoin and some of the others are like that as well. If you move further down market though, you'll see that some of them haven't participated at all. And what we see is that a lot of the so called protocol tokens basically have not really performed the ones that launched after Ethereum and are still sort of laggards. And I would suspect that the ones that are, you know, have deep markets that are. That are widely traded and widely held will be the ones that will perform. I think it's based on those metrics. I'm not going to name specifics at this point.

Thanks a lot, Alex. See you next time. Thanks for having me on Cointelegraph like Subscribe and Hodl.