Fiat failures and widespread inflation stemming from skyrocketing public debt could pave the way for bitcoin (BTC) to enter the mainstream in the next one to two years, say prominent crypto industry players.
Speaking in a recent panel at Real Vision’s The Crypto Gathering event, Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures and the co-founder of crypto market analysis firm Coin Metrics, stated that “a wave of sovereign currency failures, similar to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and similar to the post-Soviet Union [period] where sovereign currencies failed” was on the cards.
Crypto, he hinted, would be waiting with open arms if people did abandon their fiat currencies in favor of an alternative.
Carter said,
“It’s regional. It’s contagious. We begin to see some distress in lots of sovereign currencies. There’s a lot of debt, the world is very indebted in regional markets, and unfortunately, I think it’s going to … [impact] tens or hundreds of millions of people. And for some of those people, they will be able to use crypto financial rails to exit their sovereign local currency.”
Others concurred. Tuur Demeester, an economist and the founder of bitcoin alpha hedge fund Adamant Capital, stressed the disruptive potential of high levels of inflation set to follow, with governments’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic generally involving massive public spending drives.
“Inflation is the big theme for the next 12 to 24 months. The reason why is that the narrative is changing … In 2008, the question was: should we even have these bailouts? Right now, that’s off the table. It’s only about how much, and how fast,” Demeester claimed.
And Demeester even hinted that cataclysmic change unseen for centuries could be in store. He said that it scares him as this is “exactly what happened in the late 1780s in France when they ended up with hyperinflation and the French Revolution.”
“2017 – was a greed-driven rally in bitcoin. 2020 and 2021, I think, is going to be driven by fear. And that is very very explosive. Just like we saw people standing in line to by toilet paper and beef, I think they’re going to stand in line to buy bitcoin and gold. So, the time to get insurance is before your house is on fire,” Demeester said, stressing that “the house is still not on fire.”
Meanwhile, Robert Breedlove, the founder and CEO of crypto investment and digital securities consultancy firm Parallax Digital, said he thought that, with the shaky macroeconomic situation looking beneficial to cryptocurrencies, bitcoin’s rise toward the USD 100,000 mark could be inevitable, coinciding with a surge in popularity.
He stated,
“I know it sounds radical today, but, as we know, bitcoin does move geometrically quickly. I think when it breaks the [USD] 100,000 [ceiling], the world’s really going to have a sharp wake-up call. 2017 was kind of a warm-up for what’s about to come. If that’s in 12, 24, 36 months, five years – who knows? But the pressure is […] at an all-time high.”
At pixel time (16:13 UTC), BTC trades at USD 9,334 and is up by almost 1% in a day. The price is unchanged in a week. It dropped by more than 1% in a month and almost 11% in a year.
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Learn more:
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