Sitting down with Yahoo Finance, economists and financial experts broke down Bitcoin’s journey across the years and discussed what it can actually contribute to a fully functioning society. The discussion touched on all sides of Bitcoin’s progress: the good, the bad and the ugly.
Twenty nineteen caused something of an epiphany for Bitcoin as the world’s largest cryptocurrency witnessed massive fluctuations in price as well as market cap. The proponents of the industry have also made several claims as to where Bitcoin would go from here, some claiming that the value would peak while a majority still doubted its capabilities.
In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Lending Tree Chief Economist Tendayi Kapfidze stated that Bitcoin was a pyramid scheme that caused people to lose their savings. In his words:
“You only make money based on people who enter after you. It has no real utility in the world. They’ve been trying to create a utility for it for ten years now. It’s a solution in search of a problem and it still hasn’t found a problem to solve.”
Kapfidze’s words came right at the beginning of 2020 when reports revealed that Bitcoin was the best performing asset of the last decade. It’s 9 million percent increase since its inception had even trumped the rise of mainstream stocks such as Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft. These statistics did not cause the economist to waver from his stance about Bitcoin, adding that the cryptocurrency was an asset that acted as a solution without a corresponding problem. He further made his case by talking about the lack of major developments in the space despite several people working on it for over a decade.
The panel also included some individuals who believed that popular crypto can actually change some aspects of the technological industry. Bruderman Asset Management Chief Market Strategist Oliver Pursche admitted that he owned several cryptocurrencies and had started accumulating them during the crypto high tide of 2016-2017. He frankly admitted that out of his crypto reserves, some would fall to zero, some would hold at a decent rate while a couple can actually shoot up to ‘superstardom’. He added:
“I don’t think you go into it thinking that you’re going to become a billionaire or a millionaire as a result of it. You go into it very soberly understanding that you can lose all of your principle and that this is purely speculative.”
The overall sentiment about Bitcoin was that the asset was purely speculative at the moment and its’ wild ride’ in 2019 was a testament to that. Pursche pointed out Bitcoin’s volatile price fluctuations over the past year, the value going from $13,000 to $5,000 and then finally settling in the $7,000 – $8,000 range. At press time, Bitcoin was trading for $7122 with a total market cap of $129.174 billion. BTC held a 24-hour market volume of $18.906 billion after a 1.24 percent fall in price in the daily spectrum.