Ray Dalio has announced a bullish sentiment on gold in a recent blog post, and everyone has begun to equate this to Bitcoin. It’s always big news when another titan of an investor comes out with an investment thesis that fits with Bitcoin’s.
Warren Buffet is still not a fan of the cryptocurrency, and Dalio is apparently not a fan of digital currency. However, he has always been more conscious of macroeconomic shifts in the way the world works. Now he thinks the global economy is ready for a “paradigm shift”, as he calls it.
Macroeconomic Factors Pushing
The people who are into cryptocurrency are often there for a varying number of reasons. Some of them believe that it is an advancement in technology, some think it is a change in power structure, and some view it as a natural evolution in the way our economy is run.
Dalio’s explicit recommendation was not necessarily to buy Bitcoin, but to buy gold, but this would put him in the last camp. In his post on LinkedIn, he goes into detail about how many of the central banks have been executing an “easing strategy” that keeps interest rates low and increases the supply of money. The eventual effect of these measures is a devaluing of the currency in question.
And when the value of a currency goes down, the value of equities and other securities denominated in that currency tends to go up. The Federal Reserve has done this in the U.S., and the Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, and several others have done the same.
Big Bullish Bets
In more sensational news, you have John McAfee doubling down on his extreme prediction that Bitcoin would hit $1 million by 2020. McAfee is well-known for his anti-government positions, as well as his pledge to eat his own penis on live TV if Bitcoin didn’t hit $500k by 2020.
Retail investors don’t have to use quite so lofty stakes, but are now permitted to use LedgerX to bet on Bitcoin hitting $100K by 2020. These call options were originally designed due to the high demand coming from institutional investors, but are now available for use by retail investors.
Turmoil in Washington
Bitcoin’s price has climbed back to the $10K level after going under it for a short period of time. Much of this week’s price movements have been dictated by hearings in Washington D.C. regarding Facebook’s Libra project, as well as comments from various officials on Bitcoin, Libra, and cryptocurrency as a whole.
One U.S. Representative, Patrick McHenry, voiced his belief in Bitcoin’s resilience:
“I think there’s no capacity to kill Bitcoin. Even the Chinese, with their firewall and their extreme intervention in their society could not kill Bitcoin.”
From his perspective, there are a lot of imitation Bitcoins out there, but the original is doing just fine. This may apply to Facebook’s Libra as well. It is not looking like it will present a significant enough improvement to Bitcoin’s strengths to the point where investors would be willing to overlook the lack of faith they have in Facebook.