In a recent interview, Dan Tapiero, a veteran global macro investor and a co-founder of Gold Bullion International (GBI), described Bitcoin (BTC) as a “a truth machine.”
During his 20-year career, Tapiero has worked “as a portfolio manager and analyst with a number of well-known investors such as Stan Druckenmiller (Duquesne Capital), Michael Steinhardt (Steinhardt Capital), Julian Robertson (Tiger Management), Steve Cohen (SAC Capital), and Lord Rothschild (RIT Capital).”
Tapiero’s comments about Bitcoin were made during an interview with AlphaWeek that was published on Tuesday (September 10).
Tapiero said that as a macro investor, his approach to Bitcoin is from the valuation angle:
What's the value of it? What's it worth? The difficulty I always had was trying to put a value on it… I didn't quite get it. It's because Bitcoin is a lot of things.
He then proceeded to explain that one way to think of Bitcoin is as a “truth machine”:
It's an invention, and it should be referred to as an invention. You know, what it really is [that] it's a truth machine. It’s a way to eradicate all fraud or lying by human beings… I mean the whole bigger concept of certainty, of confirmation, of validity, of security… That's what you're buying – A system that's now ten years old, has a tremendous track record, and I'm thinking what's that worth.
Next, he said that at the beginning of this year, he started to think more carefully about coming up with a valuation for Bitcoin. This is when he gave his second explanation of Bitcoin:
Bitcoin is really the reward that miners get for guaranteeing the security of the framework, of the network.
So, how much is that network worth?
If you think about what would it cost for company to build that… If that belonged to one person, it's hundreds of billions of dollars… It's truly a massive endeavor… Could a company even develop that? Maybe Satoshi realized that it could only be developed slowly over time in a decentralized way because the current structure of the way that a corporation works could never work fast enough.
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