BTC Is Better Than Gold “On Every Front”, Says Hedge Fund Manager

Speaking at the 23rd annual Sohn Investment Conference, John Pfeffer, hedge fund manager at Pfeffer Capital, said that Bitcoin is the first viable candidate to replace gold, and is better than the precious metal “on every front,” MarketWatch reported yesterday, April 23.

Appearing on CNBC’s Fast Money this morning, April 24, Pfeffer confirmed his prediction that Bitcoin would rise to “no less than $90,000 and potentially as high as $700,000.” Pfeffer said that BTC and crypto assets in general should be thought of as a venture capital investment: “they could go to zero, but they could be worth much more.”

He explained that his so-called “low bar” estimate of $90,000 would hold if Bitcoin “became equal to private gold bullion holdings, about $1.5 trln of total value compared to $150 bln or thereabouts today.”

He said that higher price values, in the several hundreds of thousands, could be reached if BTC becomes a major reserve currency, which he assessed as less probable, but still possible. He gave a ballpark figure for this second scenario in yesterday’s speech, stating that if Bitcoin displaces 25% of foreign reserves, the network’s value would reach $6.4 trillion.

“Gold, frankly is rather silly. We’re a spacefaring, digital society and we’re still using a yellow metal as our non-sovereign store of value, at some point we’re going to come up with a better technology to do that, and Bitcoin is the first candidate, we’ll see if it works.”

He emphasized he didn’t envisage BTC would be used to “pay for coffee” in developed countries, but that in certain countries with collapsed currencies, BTC could become important for daily use.

When pushed for a time frame, Pfeffer judged that $90k, “only ten times the current price,” could be reached within a couple of years with private sector institutional investment coming in. His foreign reserve displacement thesis, he added, was obviously a much longer-term view.

Pfeffer’s perspective recalls the Winklevoss twins’ position in 2016 that Bitcoin as a store of value is “better at being gold than gold” itself.