Kerner also believes that general public will subsequently swap gold to Bitcoin as a long-term investment.
Commenting on gold’s rise as a safe haven investment over the last “couple of thousand years”, the Stanford University graduate opined that, “We would anticipate over time … for some of the people using gold” as a safe haven asset to change to the flagship cryptocurrency.
Panic selling
When queried about what he comprehend about the “nervous money” that is exiting Bitcoin and whether it is a “healthy thing” in the longer term, Kerner said,
this is not really something that’s brand new in terms of being different…we see new assets come [like] junk bonds [which were] created 40 years ago [and] they were extremely volatile like we’re seeing with bitcoin today. A lot of people said it was a scam, [but] 40 years later, it’s the same as everything else. We think bitcoin is going along that same [direction].”
He further stated that “any new asset in its early days is extremely volatile. Nobody knows how to price it and that’s exactly what we’re seeing with bitcoin today.
Strikingly, Kerner said in a November 2017 interview that blockchain-based innovations such as smart contracts are the “biggest thing to happen to mankind” The CryptoOracle co-founder also compared blockchain’s exponential growth and development to that of online retailing giant Amazon between 1997 and 2000. In those years, Amazon was also considered a “bubble”.
Kerner pointed out that Amazon’s stocks skyrocketed by 70x in the late 90’s, but then crashed by 95%. Kerner explained that
if you stretch it out till today…all of that violent up and violent down over those four years is just this tiny little blip. And, I think that’s where we’re at today with bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market.
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Bitcoin as a safe haven asset
Apart from Kerner, seasoned crypto analyst Willy Woo had opined that bitcoin’s price would plunge, but “then moon afterwards, just like gold in [the] WFC [Wall Street Financial Crisis] 2008.”
Woo has also predicted there would certainly be a “flight to safety” where “everything sells off to USD … then afterwards to havens like gold and BTC.” Additionally, Meltem Demirors, CoinShares’ chief strategic officer, explained that “paradigm changing technologies” like the one created by Amazon and Microsoft take a bit of time to mature. Demirors believes that this would be the case with Bitcoin and other altcoins such as Ethereum (ETH) token.
Remarkably, BTC is on its path to double the transaction volume of the global gold markets in 2018.