Billionaire Optimistic on Bitcoin as a ‘Flight to Safety’

In an interview with Morgan Creek Digital founder, Anthony Pompliano, Chamath Palihapitiya, billionaire CEO of venture capital firm, Social Capital, said that now could be Bitcoin’s time to shine.

“I think Bitcoin needed a moment like this for it to be relevant,” Palihapitiya said. “It’s still a speculative instrument, and it’s too speculative for it to be reliable,” he explained.

Bitcoin is still too turbulent

In his interview with Pompliano, Palihapitiya talked about a bevy of topics pertaining to the current global economy. In terms of replacing USD or other global currencies, Palihapitiya explained Bitcoin is still too volatile.

 “The only market that’s even more important than the debt markets are the currency markets,” he said.

Palihapitiya explained currency markets have a relatively low amount of volatility, moving in value over time. “In that, there’s value because it allows more market participants to be active in that market so that they can use it as a critical pillar of how they run their business,” he said.

Bitcoin can’t be used in the same fashion

The billionaire said Bitcoin is immensely volatile compared to the currency markets. “You can’t effectively use it,” he posited. “It pushes it into this ghetto of day traders and speculators, and right now that’s where we are.”

Palihapitiya explained that Bitcoin exits that “ghetto” by losing the day traders and speculators, while keeping some of the attraction of long-term holding.

“Then you need to have it slowly look like the traditional infrastructure could really implode,” he said. Palihapitiya added that BTC could eventually be seen as a “flight to safety,” pending the likelihood of debasement in an attempt to avoid traditional framework failure.

“Over the next 10 years, where this trajectory is going to take shape — and it is a 10-year trajectory — you’ll have a lot of time to vector into it to protect yourself and to hedge yourself,” Palihapitiya said, adding:

“This is either zero or millions, because what it will do is it will create a quasi-gold standard. It’ll create an index, except instead of having to own gold, where gold is owned by central banks, it is an instrument that has value that’s determined by and between its participants, and it’s owned by everybody.”

The crypto industry has viewed Bitcoin as a type of hedge for a number of years. Pompliano himself even lobbies for BTC as an asset uncorrelated to traditional markets.

Cointelegraph reached out to Chamath Palihapitiya for additional details, but received no response as of press time. This article will be updated accordingly should a response come in.