Bitcoin bull Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano said he thinks the price of bitcoin will eventually reach $1 million per coin.
“Bitcoin is at least 10x better than gold,” Pompliano told CNBC’s Melissa Lee on “Fast Money.”
Pompliano, co-founder of crypto-focused asset management firm Morgan Creek Digital Assets, questioned why JPMorgan analysts were “so conservative” when they predicted that the price of bitcoin could go to $146,000 or more.
He said he believes the flagship cryptocurrency is “at least 10x better than gold in every way.” If the market capitalization of bitcoin (currently at about $736 billion) even doubles that of gold (currently at about $10.6 trillion — a best-guess market cap of all mined gold) the cryptocurrency would hit $1 million per coin.
Here’s how Pompliano explained it on CNBC: “In the technology world we talk of 10X improvement of products. Bitcoin is at least 10x better than gold in every way. If you just think of a bitcoin product that’s 2x better, that would put bitcoin at a million dollars of coin — just 2x gold market cap.”
Pompliano admitted that when he says those numbers, “they kinda shock people but we have to remember that both gold and bitcoin are sound money principles.”
“Gold is the analog application of sound money principles,” he said. “Bitcoin is the digital application of sound money principles and there is not a single digital product that replaces an analog product but yet is still smaller than those analog products.
“The digital product is always bigger so I think it’s a foregone conclusion at this point that not only is bitcoin’s market cap going to flip gold but it’s just a question of how much bigger it’s going to be. Is it going to be 2x bigger, 5x bigger, 10x bigger? I don’t think we know and a timeline is a question.”
JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou predicted in a note to clients that a bitcoin price of $146,000 or more would happen in the long term.
Crowding out gold as an alternative currency implies a “big upside for bitcoin over the long term,” they wrote, but the price target is “unsustainable” for this year, according to CryptoGlobe.
“Everyone is underestimating Bitcoin’s potential,” Pompliano said in a tweet.
Not everyone agreed on Twitter, including Peter Schiff, a broker, investor, precious metals dealer and bitcoin bear who called bubble on the cryptocurrency.
“In what way is #Bitcoin 10x better than #gold?” Schiff tweeted. “Is it also 10x better than oil? How many times better is it than wheat? Claiming that every publicly traded company will hold Bitcoin instead of cash is sheer nonsenses. But sheer nonsense its what’s needed to justify the bubble.”
One Twitter user complained about how much electricity bitcoin needs: “Not an improvement when it consumes >1000x the energy per transaction compared to legacy banking and fintech systems.”
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However, others on Twitter suggested Pompliano himself was being too conservative: “100x Improvement! Bitcoin is Much Better than gold. Bitcoin is more: Censorship & Seizureship Resistant, Secure, Scarce, Portable, Divisible, Borderless, Decentralized, Liquid, Salable, Durable, Fungible, Immutable, and More Easily Verifiable than Gold,” one person tweeted.
Another said, “….it’s no longer a gold story now….now it literally is money for everyday use…and IMO 8 figures in a decade is not an impossible or improbable or even insane idea anymore.”
When bitcoin hit all-time highs of $42,000 in the past week, a narrative appeared that bitcoin had risen to around 7 percent of gold’s $10 trillion+/- market cap. The real “theft” from gold actually stands at 2 percent, according to Ki Young Ju, CEO of on-chain analytics resource CryptoQuant, according to Coin Telegraph.
“There are unclaimed, unreachable, and lost Bitcoins. Based on the realized cap, it’s just 2%,” he tweeted.
