Davos: Bitcoin will fall to zero

Heated debates are warming up the icy snow-capped city of Davos during this year’s World Economic Forum. BOE senior adviser yesterday said that cryptocurrencies were worthless. Today, BCG Digital Ventures founder Jeff Schumacher said Bitcoin price will fall to zero. Schumacher is a top investor and relative veteran in the space. He told an open-mouthed CNBC panel that he believed bitcoin has no value and that it was useless as a currency. Instead, he’s far more interested in blockchain technology.

Other panelists included Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse, Silver Lake Partners Co-Founder Glenn Hutchins, and 500 Startups Partner, Edith Yeung. They discussed, dissected, and debated the future of blockchain technology. All panelists agreed that blockchain technology will drive the future of applications and finance. However, Schumacher insisted that while bitcoin may be a great technology, it had no intrinsic value: I do believe it will go to zero. I think it’s a great technology but I don’t believe it’s a currency. It’s not based on anything.

The industry’s had its share of analysists predicting that bitcoin price will fall lower than $3,000, with one infamous Bloomberg analyst calling for a floor of $1.5K. We’ve also heard doom and gloom spelled out for Ethereum being useless as a currency and a developer platform instead. But it’s rare to hear people on the inside invested in the space calling for a zero-value bitcoin.

Not everyone was in agreement this chilly morning in Davos. Although, Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, said that rather than a currency, he saw bitcoin’s role in the future more as a store of value: It might be that the role of bitcoin in the system could be to bring value back, to hold your value there while you have tokens that have other use cases. He also added that his main concern wasn’t the price of bitcoin but the advancement of the underlying blockchain technology, to which his panelists agreed. I am much less interested in investing around bitcoin as a currency unit or a currency equivalent, or even the blockchain as an accounting ledger. I am thinking much more about the protocols.

Bitcoin Price Will Tank to ‘Zero’, Claims Investment Firm Chief at Davo, CCN, Jan 24