On Monday (November 26th), Vinny Lingham, one of the “sharks” on entrepreneurial-themed reality TV show “Shark Tank South Africa”, gave his thoughts on the Bitcoin price in an interview on CNBC’s “Fast Money” show.
Lingham, who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Civic, the blockchain-based startup that is a leader in the identity verification space, has been given the nickname “Bitcoin Oracle” by the media due to his uncannily good Bitcoin price predictions.
Yesterday, when BItcoin was trading around $3,660, Lingham appeared as a guest on CNB’s “Fast Money” show. The host, CNBC anchor Melissa Lee, started by asking him where he thought the Bitcoin Price was going from here:
“I think it’s going to be range-bound for a while, between $3K and $5K, at least three to six months. I don’t think we break through the support level of $3,000 just yet. I think there’s a lot of buying in the short-term around that mark. But if we don’t get out of the crypto bear market cycle in the next three to six months, that $3,000 level could go.”
Lee then asked him if such a price prediction had made be considered an “enemy” of the crypto community. He replied:
“So, I have a very chequred past with the crypto community, mainly because I got involved with crypto and Bitcoin in 2013, and for a long part of it, I was a bull, and then last year, I wrote a blog post in February, warning of the risks of another bubble to crypto and Bitcoin in particular, as we had just exited one from 2014. I’ve always been very consistent about fundamentals needing to lead the market, not speculation, but the community disagrees, and everyone is very happy with price moments of $1,000 to $10,000 to $20,000 and then back down to $3,000 the next year, whereas I think that this doesn’t make it an investment-grade asset. And if you keep speaking about institutional investors coming to the table and ETFs being approved, you can’t have this sort of volatility in an asset class when you want big money to get involved.”
Next, Lee asked Lingham if this kind of price volatility was not hurting projects that wanted to build around Bitcoin and blockchain. He answered:
“I don’t think it halts it. I definitely think it slows it down. The issue is really the narrative. The Bitcoin narrative is that this is a store of value, and so people buying at $15,000 or $20,000 believe that, and that’s proven not to be true. The original narrative, which I bought into, is that this is a payment network that could compete with Visa and Mastercard… Bitcoin can’t get there because the community has basically blocked an increase in [block] capacity from 1MB upwards.”
Lee also asked if there was currently any reason to be bullish on Bitcoin. He stated:
“I think in the short term it is a market where you’ve scared away the retail investors, you’ve scared away the institutional money… So, it’s kind of a risky scenario… Obviously, high risk, high reward. So, if the market does turn, this could be a great time to buy right now, but I think… there will be better opportunities later on. You may to pay a bit more, but buying in above the key support level that was broken, $5,700, so buying in at that level or $6,000 in the future would obviously be a higher price, but you’d be a bit more de-risked if Bitcoin could get to that level and make a run back to its previous highs.”
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