How High Can Bitcoin Go Now That It's Hit Its All-Time High?

[Music] hi everyone I'm Rosemary Miller here with Mike belelli the CEO and founder of bito here to tell us about Bitcoin reaching new all-time highs thank you so much for joining me today Mike great to be here thank you so Mike Bitcoin just reached a new record high of $69,500 surpassing its previous high of $ 68,9 set in 2021 what's behind the sharp rise this year well I think it's all the news that we've been building towards over the last you know nearly a decade now you know the the main driver here of course is the the approval of the ETFs that happened in January um and all of a sudden you know there's a distribution Channel where people can access direct exposure to bitcoin um which is larger than any distribution Channel we've ever had and of course that's the traditional financial markets uh here in the United States um all of the ETFs have been bringing a tremendous amount of flow um from you know kind of the folks that have been in this for a long time and bito you know we've been doing this since 2013 um you we like what's going on with with Bitcoin in terms of providing an asset that's got uh a monetary policy that is static and fixed so you hear about this a lot that there's a fixed Supply um and you as more people learn about the advantages of a fixed Supply value storage system uh they realize wait a minute the systems we've been using uh you know dollar denominated or Fiat denominated in other countries has a lot of weaknesses by comparison and so all of a sudden everybody's looking at like what's going on at the the government you know monetary policy level there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty and people are like I don't know what's going to happen with the US dollar is it going to remain the reserve currency of the world forever well probably not is that going to go in a cycle that's going to harm Me Maybe I think I ought to have some Bitcoin in my in my portfolio and here's a really simple way that you know retail investors and others can think about it you know you can take two or 3% of your portfolio today and you can put it into Bitcoin and the worst case is that you will be two to three% poorer tomorrow down the down the line that's the worst case and by the way it's still a bit experimental there is still risk there's a lot of volatility all of those things are true you should be buyer beware for sure but the upside potential of it is basically unbounded so when do you have opportunity in your lifetime to enter into something that's got that kind of asymmetric downside and upside potential uh it just it just doesn't happen very often and just to make sure you don't think this is me a little tiny crypto bitgo company doing this Fidelity Fidelity has a a group of funds uh I think it's called the all-in-one or or or all-in-one fund or something like that they just announced I think it was last week that their portfolio recommendation and they've got kind of three they got a conservative and a medium and a high-risk the conservative one is a 1% crypto allocation medium is 2% the higher risk is 3% the only thing I disagree with on their numbers is I think those should be ratcheted to three to 5 perc instead of 1 to 3% but um even the guys that have been doing this for a long time and remember Fidelity is you know the top two um asset managers on the planet and the other one is Black Rock also uh major ETF in the Bitcoin space their CEO Larry thinkink uh is all over digital assets and crypto and looking to move deeper into that space so anyway a lot of validation has happened a lot of regulatory uncertainty has gone away distribution channel to millions of people and frankly a backdrop where you know fiscal policy for Fiat is really demonstrating the value of why you would want to be participating in Bitcoin well Mike we kind of touched on retail investors and the institutional investors who's doing the buying right now that is you know responsible for this price rise it's interesting you see a lot of speculation out there uh I've met with a number of our investors that are traditional Financial guys that are all over this um and typically what people say is they're seeing small ticket sizes what that means is it doesn't look indicative of tremendous amounts of institutional flow I think the institutional flow is is ticking up a little bit but remember the ETF was approved in January um institutions move pretty slowly and conservative I don't think that anybody was like saying oh okay it's definitely going to approved in January instead they they wait to see that happen they wait to see what the initial Fallout ShakeOut is or the 11 different ETFs that all get launched and then they go to their investment committees and they start to push forward after that so I think the institutions are yet to come I think this has been largely retail driven that is those that are calling up their Brokers and they couldn't do it before it was too intimidating to get access to bitcoin kind of doing it on your own and holding your own keys and things like that um and this is actually very encouraging I think for the space because there's a lot of people saying this is the institutional money I think the institutional money is Yet to Come well are there any other factors that can contribute to the price going up and are there any factors that could make the price go down look there's a lot of risks let's talk about the downside risks right um this is a relatively new technology now it's not that new it's been around for 15 years it's run incredibly uh resiliently um it's had a constant fiscal polic policy it's the only system in the history of mankind which has had an un tinkered uh fiscal policy of any other any other system um and that's because humans usually like to tweak things right suddenly you're making money and you're like hey why don't we tweak it to make a little more money um but uh but Bitcoin doesn't do that it's very static so there's there's a lot of uh stability of being around for for 15 years but it is still relatively new is it possible that we would have a major hiccup somewhere in the technology I POS as possible there's some threats around Quantum technology which some people are worried about I think those will be mitigated pretty easily as they come but you can't you can't fully dismiss it and then you know regulatory action remember money is power um and what we're seeing right now is a lot of political forces starting to uh Galvanize and organize against Bitcoin because they see this as a threat to their power um now my view of this is that any of these threats are short-term for the long-term uh I think I think Bitcoin has staying power remember Bitcoin is the form of money that Returns the power to the people and returning power to the people we've seen it in history it can be brutal it can take time but in the end of the day you know the people win um and this is a system which puts all of us as individuals at the exact same priority as every banking financial institution Goldman Sachs JP Morgan Etc and where do you want to be you know when the going gets tough do you want to be in control of your own Destiny or do you want to be dependent on on those other parties so there is risk sorry well no worries I I we're seeing new all-time highs I'm kind of wondering should people have panicked so much when Bitcoin was it what like 16 17,000 look there's a lot of Education here this is a different monetary system so um my own experience I mean you know maybe I I learned about Bitcoin earlier but I'm not some super genius that just like instantly saw this for what it should be it's it's a radically different system you know we all spend our time thinking so much about the money that we receive in exchange for the hard labor and work that we do um but do we think about the system that's behind it how does it work what is the value of money you know when when I started in the system there were there was the major complaint against Bitcoin is that it's backed by nothing it can't be worth anything well what is Fiat backed by it's also backed by nothing and if you ask or survey Americans to this day you will hear a significant portion of them think that somehow money is still backed by gold that's that's a fiction it's just simply not true um pretty much all of the currencies around the globe are are Fiat based anyway so it's no surprise that you come out with this thing that's crazy it's Bitcoin it was founded by some guy named Satoshi nobody knows what he is there's like Mining and you have to do these you know uh you know proof of work which uses a lot of energy of of course it takes time to get your head around like what are each of these components and how do they work but at this point it's been heavily scrutinized um you know I'm probably one of the smaller players like I mentioned you know Larry thinkink over at at Black Rock of course he was slow to the game Fidelity got into this in like 2016 with Abby Johnson going full in and of course down the line whether you're talking about Paul tutor Jones or Anthony scaramucci like folks that are major Financial investment advisers um are all looking at this as saying okay this past the muster of like it's legitimate um and now we can start to think about how does that really impact change from the way the traditional Financial system has operated for so long and speaking of traditional Finance since now they're kind of in bed with Bitcoin does that make a difference with bitcoin's current all-time high whereas you know we had all these strange players who are kind of out of the way now is it different this time well for sure it is um you know these These are parties that are highly trusted you know in the financial system um some would argue that they shouldn't be I think they deserve a lot of credit for building kind of things to the way they are many people put their investments in their hands so forget about Bitcoin for a moment I mean imagine if you know I don't know who your broker is maybe it's Charles Schwab maybe it's TD Merit trade whatever imagine if you logged into your brokerage account one day and everything said zero yeah could happen right but you probably don't think about that very often but there could be a glitch in the system there could be a mistake the broker that you trust 100% with all of your money could just say oh nope we don't have any record of that sorry see you later look Bitcoin changes this right Bitcoin actually makes it so it is transparent now when you buy it through a broker it's got some of those same issues um but these trusted parties have been working with investors of course if lots of people had zeros showing up unexpectedly in their bank accounts they wouldn't have a lot of customers so obviously they work hard to make sure that that doesn't happen having them participate in the ecosystem validates helps make it so that we can distribute this to more people as we distribute it to more people it gets more stable the volatility goes down tremendous number of benefits lastly on the regulatory side now look this is operating through the approved system of the US government um you know the SEC established back in the 30s um the main tenants of the SEC were also uh established in the early 40s they've been evolving quite a bit but when you look at how do you manage assets in a safe way for us retail investors we now have a product which completely fits within those uh those rules well thank you so much for joining me today Mike thanks for having me

Channel: Forbes

Views: 88,132

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, bitcoin, bitcoin mining, bitcoin numbers up, ETFs, SEC, cryptocurrency surges, cryptocurrency where to invest, retirement funds, crypto investors, Bitcoin Ether, Ether, forbes digital assets, bitcoin ETFs, bitcoin market, bitcoin surge, where should i invest bitcoin, NFTs, EFTs, Ethereum, Ether Bitcoin, Bitgo, BitGo cofounder and CEO Mike Belshe, Mike Belshe

Id: sqmXZRfX3dc

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024