Bitcoin will soar to $500,000 because the US will start a war with Iran and Venezuela – of the hash-rate rather than the military variety – and the first salvoes may soon be fired, according to crypto analyst and TV personality Max Keiser.
In the latest episode of RT’s Keiser Report, he predicts that the Iranian and Venezuelan regimes will force the Trump administration to reluctantly embrace the top crypto.
With Iran potentially controlling 3% of the Bitcoin hash rate (the speed at which a given mining machine operates) already and Venezuela accepting bitcoin payments, albeit only briefly, it may only be a matter of time before the Americans decide they need to fight for supremacy on the crypto battlefield.
“Iran has already got 3% of global hash rate, so now I think Venezuela will get 3%-5% pretty quickly,” says Keiser, who has been imploring his viewers to invest in bitcoin since it was just $1.
“And then at some point America will say, ‘We’ve got to enter the 21st-century space race of mining bitcoin,’ and then they’ll try to seek 20% of the hash rate, and then security goes up dramatically, and the price goes to $400,000, $500,000.”
‘Reformation of free speech’
Keisays says bitcoin represents the “reformation of free speech,” something governments deny citizens by controlling the currency they use.
“Bitcoin is the Mona Lisa of the 21st century: It’s self-aware, it is observing us through the quantum mechanical aspects of technology, and it’s channeling the eyes of God,” he says.
“So, this is God looking at us through the protocol and trying to figure out, ‘How do we fix this human species because they’ve gone way off track due to central banking?’”
The sharp contrast between the current situation in the macro markets and the plight of many Americans, exemplified in the Black Lives Matter protests, supports Keiser’s argument, Cointelegraph points out.
The stock markets are seeing their best quarter since 2011 against a backdrop of violent civil unrest across the country, mass unemployment and the systematic debasement of the US dollar.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve has taken ownership of huge chunks of the equity markets, equal to 30% of US gross domestic product.
Keiser is passionately critical of the fiat currency system, which he says is a mechanism governments use to effectively steal from their citizens by reducing spending power and amassing debt through unconstrained money printing.
Bitcoin insurgency?
Last week, Keiser urged angry protesters to abandon their retaliatory tactics in favor of simply opting out of the fiat system by converting their US dollars, which he calls “fiat debt-coupons,” into bitcoin – essentially turning the crypto into a fiscal weapon.
He says: “The truth is, if you want individual sovereignty, if you want justice, if you want uncensorable, unconfiscatable, indestructible wealth, there’s only one way to go – and that’s bitcoin.”
Forbes journalist Roger Huang last week expressed a similar view, citing Asian examples of crypto facilitating civil disobedience: “In a world being swept by protest, some of that potential is manifesting itself now.
“Chinese netizens have used ethereum to make sure that messages that would otherwise be censored in online protest could live as long as possible, secured by a network of coordinating nodes.”
He adds, “In Hong Kong, cryptocurrency has helped finance the distribution of supplies to protesters and when protesters sought to switch out from Hong Kong dollars to demonstrate their opposition to the erosion of fundamental rights, some of them thought of bitcoin as an alternative.”