In the most recent episode of CNBC Africa’s “Crypto Trader”, host Ran Neu-Ner, got the chance to interview early Bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem, and ask for Shrem’s views on the cryptocurrency market.
Neu-Ner, who is also a co-founder of crypto-focused asset management firm Onchain Capital, spoke with Shrem at this year’s North American Bitcoin Conference, which was held January 16–18 in Miami, Florida.
This article takes a look at some of the highlights of Neu-Ner’s interview with Charlie Shrem.
Q: Is this the most serious bear market?
A: “100%. This is the most serious bear market by far because it’s when people invested real money and we actually had a crazy price run-up and a lot of people were saying that it would never end.
Q: Could we just HODL as with the previous bear markets, or is it different this time?
A: “The question that people were always asking in the prevoius bubble was ‘Will Bitcoin exist a year from now?’… No-one is asking that question now. It is ‘How long will the bear market last?’. So, I think it’s different in that there is enough security in the crypto space for it to exist long term, and if you loo at the price action now, you see it’s a lot more accumulation happening at a faster price, and people are accumulating back in at lower levels and they want to have their long term cryptoassets.”
Q: What about Ethereum, EOS, and these other super computing networks? Will they continue to exist?
A: “A lot of them are gonna die. A lot of them are dying right now. Some of them will exist, some of them won’t. They are still very much science experiments, and as the leaders ot these projects go, even Ethereum’s Vitalik and Vlad have said ‘Ethereum is not money; don’t put your life savings into Ethereum’, and [they are] constantly warning people not to go fully-vested into these things because sxxx happens and it all comes down to one or two people being able to fix them.”
Q: What are you expecting in 2019?
A: “2019 will see a lot of phoenixes rising from the ashes. You’ll see a lot of the projects that were getting built in 2019 start to deliver in 2019. It’s a lot of projects that we are not hearing about right now that raised money, they’ve been under the radar… They’ve been building, they’ve been staying quiet, and not wasting [time on] press announcements because those really don’t matter right now… These projects are going to have to deliver, and it could either be a fantastic year because these are amazing things, or they could completely flop, and it will be a crappy year.”
Q: Are you still all in?
A: “I’m still all in crypto. This is my future. This is my legacy. I don’t have an adult life without crypto. I got involved in this space when I was still in college. So I have nothing else.”
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Steele Rutherford via Unsplash.com
