Adam Back, an original Bitcoin (BTC) contributor—according to some the man behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym— and CEO of crypto-dev company Blockstream predicted that bitcoin will hit $300,000 per coin within five years.
Back points to two sources for this rocket fuel to propel Bitcoin 15x from its current record high, at $20,000: “money printing,” and non-institutional investors.
Bitcoin to $300,000
The more immediate cause for Bitcoin to potentially rise, according to Back and many others, is the significant amount of money being pumped into economies around the world in an effort to combat the (economic) effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Already trillions of dollars have been committed in the U.S. alone to this cause, to shore up an a battered economy that is already seeing Great Depression levels of unemployment.
Back told Bloomberg that Bitcoin is something that would “[retain] value when there’s a lot of money printing in the world.” He continued, saying that the traditional investing favorites like real estate or bonds may not see the sort of yields they have in the past, which is “causing people to think about the value of money and looking for ways to preserve money.”
It is worth noting that inflation has been notoriously absent in the last couple of decades, even when economists swear that it should be more prevalent.
The other X-factor that Back thinks will launch Bitcoin in the coming years is retail investors, i.e., normal folks. Having propelled the digital asset to where it is long before institutions got interested, Back says this traditional source of demand will continue to carry Bitcoin.
It is also worth noting here, however, that by all appearances institutions do seem to be entering Bitcoin in force lately: CryptoGlobe recently reported on a record inflow of half a billion dollars into crypto through Greyscale Investments, in Q1 of this year—the vast majority of it from hedge funds.
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