Tim Draper predicts Bitcoin hits $250,000 by early 2023, driven by retail adoption through Lightning and OpenNode. Once people can buy food, shelter, and clothing with BTC, he argues, they'll abandon fiat entirely. He compares Bitcoin's platform role to early Microsoft and praises experimentation across crypto like Aragon, Tezos, and DeFi.
Questions this video answers
November 5, 2021.
21 million.
$250,000.
Once every four years.
$62,000 (mentioned as 'we're at 62,000').
Chapters
Foreign. Hi, everyone. It's Giovanni here from Web Summit 2021. I'm here with Tim Draper. How are you doing, sir?
Doing great. Thanks for having me on your show, Giovanni. The Web Summit is really extraordinary. And what's really exciting is the energy level is so high because the people who came are the ones who want to live their lives. There are a lot of people hiding behind their zoom calls. This is the group that wants to live their lives, and so there is an energy here unmatched by other conferences.
Regarding your personal interest, are you interested in any specific sectors of the crypto industry apart from bitcoin? What are the sectors that you are scared scouting around in the latest time?
Well, you said apart from bitcoin. Bitcoin is really the center of my focus because I look and I say bitcoin's the way they're in the position of maybe what Microsoft was in back when the Internet was getting going or when software was getting going, where they could pick and choose. They were the operating system, and they could pick and choose which applications they wanted to operate on their operating system. I think it's similar here. So I think bitcoin will be the big winner. But I also think there's some real creativity that's come from a lot of the entrepreneurs who are trying other things with crypto. Aragon, for instance, is a new jury system, and it might lead us to a liquid democracy someday. The Tezos guys, they've created a whole system of governing through proof of stake. I think that's really innovative and exciting. I think that there are some really interesting and exciting new cryptocurrencies. But then there are all these amazing projects. Whether they be around smart contracts or NFTs or DeFi, they're coming up with new ways of in DeFi, new ways of running financial systems and creating more liquidity in all these markets. And more liquidity means more wealth for the world, and that's exciting. And NFTs could take on many different lives. I thought about art, of course, but. But I thought about using NFTs for voting because they are all one of each. NFT is a specific item of only one and can't be copied. And that's perfect for a voting system. And it's probably good for about 5,000 other great applications that no one's come up with yet. So cool things are going to be happening.
When we talk about the following year, like 2022. We saw that in 2021. It was a great year for bitcoin, for crypto in general. We saw that the first Bitcoin ETF was accepted in the U.S. we saw the rise of NFTs, as you mentioned. What are the milestones that we should look forward to for 2022, according to you?
I think the big milestone for 2022 will be that retailers start using Opennode or Lightning Network to allow their customers to use Bitcoin. And that once that happens, once people can buy their food, clothing and shelter with bitcoin, they're not going to use any fiat currency ever again. Why would you. If you can hold a currency that is sort of the currency of the future and a currency that, you know is. They're only 21 million, not, not subject to any political whims. Nobody's printing trillions of them. Would rather hold that than you would a currency that is subject to inflationary pressure, something a government can pull back from you. I just think you're going to end up with people really running for bitcoin running.
But do you think that's going to happen in 2022? Doesn't it look a little bit too ahead of time, people accepting bitcoin in retail for transactions, so on?
Well, they're already doing it now. I was in New York and I went and got a haircut and I said, do you take bitcoin? And they said, yeah, here, you know, we're using Opennode. I think it was Opennode. Yeah, here, you can use Bitcoin. And they were actually pretty enthusiastic about it. So they were thinking, my bitcoins are going to be worth more than my dollars are. So, yeah, buy it in bitcoin. And I think people say to me, well, when are you going to sell your bitcoin? And I say, into what? Why would I ever sell this? It would be like saying, I'm going to take dollars and convert them into Confederate dollars or take Euros and turn them into Greek drachma or French francs. It's taking a currency of the present and the future and trading it for a currency of the past. I don't want to do that. In fact, I want to move out of as much fiat currency as I possibly can so that I can move it into bitcoin.
If you had to make a price prediction for the end of this year, what would that prediction be?
Oh, I only make one prediction every four years. And my prediction about three years ago was that Bitcoin will hit 250,000 by 2022, the end of 2022 or early 2023. And people thought I was crazy because it was at 4,000 when I said it, but they don't think I'm quite as crazy now.
We are half the way through.
Well, we're at 62,000.
I mean, not half away.
But if it's a log scale, we're more than half the way there.
