For those who missed live coverage of Latin American Bitcoin Conference with Tuur Demeester „Bitcoin as an investment“ here is a transcript:
Bitcoin represents freedom in the most tangible sense. It means I have access to my own money and nobody can change that. It means it’s not going to happen one day I come in to my bitcoin bank and it’s gonna be closed. It means the CEO of btc is not gonna come up on TV and say: ‘We will not devalue btc. It will not happen. We will not depeg it from other currencies.’ Only the next day to see we have devaluation of officially 30 % and at the end of month it’s 50% or more. That doesn’t happen in bitcoin.
Bitcoin represents an entirely new asset class that haven’t existed before. It’s as if gold was invented seven years ago and here was one of the first gold conferences and it’s like „All right, how do I buy it? Where should I store it… and the price moves really crazy, should I buy in? It’s like now people getting understand what Bitcoin is.
Q&A session followed:
Q: How do you see Bitcoin as an asset that can serve as a collateral for insurance?
A: Two years ago I had a discussion with someone who wanted to setup life bitcoin insurance, pool money together from maybe 100, maybe 1000 people and when something happen to one of them, the ammount could be paid to this person. It’s interesting because the value of bitcoin could rise over time, so even a small amount every year for insurance could pay out a lot. I think it’s perfectly possible, question is to what extent are people ready for to do that, to commit to that, to understand the concept of pooling money. That’s what I keep arguing, Bitcoin at least as a ingredient in a broader mix, is very potent to help insure a value of portfolio. It’s basically cash, the best cash there is. Only has very different properties and it’s not printed out of thin air. I think it’s a great idea to consider that.
Q: If you were en employer and Bitcoin your employee, what would you hire it for?
A: 1, insurance policy or cash available, but b/c it’s also hard money it can be a store of value. If I have a currency basket that represents 100 dolars, I wanna have 0.5 USD or 1 Usd at least in btc. B/c that is going to help to insure at least value of that cash.
2, A part of a speculative portfolio. Then you could go higher with percentage. You create a portfolio that is designed to positively respond to political distortions in a market. For example if interest rates are very low and we have huge stock market bubble or bond bubble, Im going to insure against that by betting on hard asset, on something that can’t go just bankrupt. Maybe you could of 3-5 % of your speculative portfolio. Maybe you would have some gold in there, maybe something other depending on circumstances.
3, for younger people and people with more apetite for risk would be to hire bitcoin as a bet on an early retirement. Because if you look at the possible outcome of btc, even central bankers, CB of Barbados came up these days in where they projected the price of btc and it’s not that hayekian scenario, it’s a base case scenario, they project the price of btc in 10 years to be 3 mil. dollars. And I am not saying these authorities are right, these prices are not outlandish. So having a little bit of btc in your portfolio as a young person can really be a bet on an early retirement. So that would be another hire for bitcoin.
Q: Bitcoin is not deep enough in order to not to move the market so fast when doing larger transactions. Would this volatility or sensitivity of Bitcoin in the future be reduced? Because this uncertainty would be difficult for traders or exporters to manage.
A: It’s true the volume of Bitcoin markets are relatively shalow, I think 100 000 Usd wouldn’t move the price so much. But that’s where OTC (Over-the-counter) market comes. Just place an order, negotiate the transaction price and it’s never on the exchange. So you don’t move the price. But of course when you are a trader maybe you want to move in and out in a few hours with those kind of volumes. I think the more traders coming to the exchanges, doing it with 10 or 20 000 Usd and they provide the liquidity to the market. It’g going to happen more and more. If you compare it with what happened to gold in 2000, gold was pretty much dead at that time and then by 2004 started gaining traction. But it was all the same. You could invest only in gold mining companies, but from 2006 you got gold ETFs and then easy vehicles came to the market for people move in and out. GDX, GDL, these financial assets have huge volumes and those offer a solution for traders. People who want to hold Bitcoin for longterm might be sceptical to those products because ‘Is it going to be fully backed by Bitcoin?… But for traders this is the way to go. So I think we have some Bitcoin ETFs coming on the market, you will see the trading volume go up a lot.
Q: Is it possible to compare the price pattern of Bitcoin to some other asset?
A: Bitcoin is a start-up currency. We haven’t seen nothing like before, but if you look at technology stocks for example you can see the same kind of wild rallies and then crashes. Because Bitcoin is sensitive, it is an answer to moments of panic, like what we have seen in Cyprus or in China with more capital controls. Maybe the Australians are panicking because their currency has dropped by 30%. If you google „Buy btc“ then you will see that Australia today is the country where people search that term the most. It’s not the US or UK. Because of that, spikes in price are more agressive. Rallies are much more agressive. Nobody is going to panic by Microsoft or by Google, but people can panic by Bitcoin when they think the next day they won’t have access to their bank account. So I really do think it’s a unique. You really do have something like this in gold market, especially in late 70’s there were a lot of panic buying, because people thought of hyperinflation would happen, but even there the market was not so accessible as Bitcoin is today. So even that big rally happened slower than what we saw in Bitcoin.
Q:What’s the target of the next rally?
A:It’s the moon obviously! I find it very difficult to name the number and say oh, this will be so and so. It’s kind of like asking yourself in 1998 how high is the NASDAQ going to go?
We’re gonna see a bubble, higher highs, how high that gonna go? There is a few things to look out for. Sentiment. How do people talk, do you see a stories of people putting all their lifesaving into btc, all the scepticism go away, like there is no other solution than for Bitcoin to go to another 5x or 10x. That’s when you wanna be cautious.
Obviously 1000 USD level is important, maybe 60% chance Bitcoin will rally to that level. And then maybe other 40% that the price will go above. The blocksize debate is still not over, but my money is on price rally in 2016.
The block reward is halving, blocksize debate is maturing and we are going to see solution there, sidechains is a huge story and it’s really underpreciated. This is the story I am most exited about in Bitcoin. And obviously the financial system is in dire straits. Markets are really overvalued, we could see a stock markets to crash in 2016. We have seen already more volatility in regular markets. Look at the oil price that went down so much, the Swiss franc was a huge surprise, all these emerging market currencies that are going down, so plenty of fuel for Bitcoin rally.