Adam Back: Bitcoin Will Rise to $300K on Crisis Even Without Institutions
Adam Back: Bitcoin Will See $300K on Crisis Even Without Institutions
Blockstream’s Adam Back states that unlimited money printing and crisis will spur investor’s interest to Bitcoin and push the price to $300,000 within five years.
In an interview with Bloomberg — in which he once again denied he was Bitcoin (BTC) creator Satoshi Nakamoto — Back explained the reasons for the sky-high price forecast.
The cypherpunk OG — who was cited in the Bitcoin White Paper — added that BTC may not need the long-awaited flood of institutional money to stimulate a bull run:
“It might not require additional institutional adoption because the current environment is causing more individuals to think about hedging,” Back said. “And retaining value when there’s a lot of money printing in the world.”
Back is a HODLer
Back — who HODLs the BTC he mines waiting for price appreciation — named several trends working in Bitcoin’s favor. These included more people working from home as well as overvalued bonds and real estate investments which make it difficult to get a robust return on most investments.
“It is causing people to think about the value of money and looking for ways to preserve money,” Back said. “It’s a difficult environment to get any yield.”
While he praised institutional investment fund Grayscale Investments, which is now buying more Bitcoin than is being mined, he stated the investors’ call from Goldman Sachs last week showed many big players did not understand the paradigm shift. However, this was a money making opportunity for those already in the space.
“It showed some misunderstandings about digital scarcity and what’s useful about Bitcoin,” Back explained.
“You have a major sophisticated market player like that with unclear understanding of the value. To me that indicates there’s still a lot of headroom for price appreciation and adoption in the market.”
Back in the day
In May, a YouTube video from Barely Sociable stated Back was Satoshi and garnered 300,000 views. He is one of likely candidates, being an early cypherpunk who came up with Hashcash — a system of verification used by Bitcoin. So is he the man?
“No I am not,” he argued, adding that Satoshi’s identity shouldn’t be disclosed because Bitcoin is similar to digital gold and “you wouldn’t want gold to have a founder.”
“For Bitcoin to keep a commodity-like perception, I think it’s a very good thing that Satoshi stays out of the public.”
Which suggests that even if he was, he wouldn’t admit to it. It’s a Catch-22.
Inflation makes $300K achievable
In January, Back commented on reports which had found early Bitcoin dev Hal Finney’s wild speculation that Bitcoin may be worth $10 million one day. Back said that it was absolutely possible that high inflation could render 1 USD worth 10 cents over a decade or so, which would mean: “$10mil/BTC is $1mil/BTC in today’s money.”
“And $100K Bitcoin doesn’t seem so far given we already crossed $10k threshold a few times when few expected even $1k some years back and $10k seemed crazy.”
With that in mind, it’s possible that Back anticipates a $300,000 BTC price in five years’ time to be more achievable as it would be worth considerably less in today’s money due to inflation.
