After the mauling it has taken in the markets and the media over the last few weeks, the crypto-currency industry needed some good news. And on Monday it seemed to have found some.
According to financial news portal FX Empire, prominent crypto writer Daniel Krawisz says Bitcoin, which currently wavers around the $6,500 price point, will be worth $100 million by 2030.
It will happen, reported FX Empire, with something called “hyper-bitcoinization” where “Bitcoin is expected to become the world’s dominant form of money.” Central bank concerns over Bitcoin “should end as more people join the crypto-currency bandwagon” writes FX Empire, as Bitcoin goes on to re-frame the “citizen’s roles in a borderless, global economy.”
The enigmatic Daniel Krawisz is hard to gauge. He has a solid scientific background with a Master’s degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin and was an early advocate of Bitcoin. He has said he was involved as early as 2011, after he realized that Bitcoin had the potential to be “an extraordinary step forward for liberty” that, if adopted, would prevent the US government from manipulating “the economy through inflation and control of the banks.” If Krawisz purchased some Bitcoins back then, when it was trading for less than 50 cents – and from his writing he certainly seems to have done so – he would have had plenty of opportunities to make some serious cash.
Which is why, perhaps, he can now spend his time writing about “information theory, machine learning, physics, mathematics, evolutionary biology, Austrian economics, cryptography and psychoanalysis” and also making lengthy and often very funny videos that ponder the future of Bitcoin.
His YouTube channel, called the “Bitcoin stuff series”, includes a six-minute long film called “Why governments can’t stop Bitcoin” and also the hour-plus “Enter the Wardrobe into Narnia”, where Krawisz argues that C.S. Lewis’ famous “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” fictional fantasy land is “a lot like Bitcoin” because “in Bitcoin you meet weirdos, you meet crazy people… if you imagine the people in Bitcoin are like the monsters in Narnia, then that will help you keep grounded.” Verbose they might occasionally be, but Krawisz’s videos certainly are witty. And very spoof-like.
Which perhaps, brings us to the real point here. How serious was Krawisz, whose work so often seems tongue-in-cheek, when he said Bitcoin will be worth $100 million in a little over a decade?
Well, apparently not at all. Because he denies ever saying it.
“Most of the claims attributed to me in [the FX Empire] article are not true,” he said on his Twitter feed yesterday. “I never claimed any specific value for Bitcoin or gave a time limit.” He suggests that the FX article rehashes and then misrepresents some of his earlier thoughts but does concede, in true Krawisz fashion, that the article did “correctly identify me as a leading Bitcoin philosopher.”
As both academia and law enforcement agencies begin to sharpen their focus on the how and why of crypto-markets movements, the role that media may have played has also started to be examined and certainly more work will be done on this line of research.
But until it does… maybe we can expect some good news tomorrow?
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