Virgin Galactic President and CEO of Social Capital Chamath Palihapitiya said bitcoin has effectively replaced gold. Having predicted that the price of the cryptocurrency would hit $200,000, the executive said bitcoin’s “market cap is just going to grow.”
Palihapitiya: “I can say with enough confidence that Bitcoin has indeed replaced gold”
Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya spoke about bitcoin in an interview with CNBC at the Delivering Alpha conference last week. The billionaire executive is also the founder and CEO of Social Capital.
Earlier this year, Palihapitiya predicted that the price of BTC would hit $ 200,000 in about five years. Commenting on his price prediction, he said Wednesday:
It’s very difficult for me sitting here to give you a price prediction, but I can say with enough confidence that bitcoin, I think, has indeed replaced gold. And it will continue to do so. And so that market cap is just going to grow.
Bitcoin is priced at $ 48,093 and its market cap is $ 905.8 billion at the time of writing, based on data from Bitcoin.com Markets.
Palihapitiya has long been a supporter of bitcoin. He revealed last year: “In 2013, I bought a lot and at one point I think I had almost 5% of all the bitcoins. My base is around $ 80 a piece. I never bought more.
The billionaire investor was quoted last week as saying: “I haven’t put a lot of money outside of bitcoin obviously. You know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions – like a little capital right now. It could get very big. But irrespective of what I do, I will say we all need to pay attention to it because I think the implications are enormous.”
He explained that cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (challenge) are part of Web 3.0 while Google and Facebook dominated the first two versions of the internet. The next stage of the evolution of the internet “is rebuilding all of that stuff without an obvious leader,” the Virgin Galactic chairman said. “It’s completely headless. It’s entirely peer-to-peer. And I think it’s both scary and exhilarating.
Palihapitiya also reportedly commented on whether regulators could kill bitcoin or cryptocurrency. Some people, like Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, have warned that governments could kill cryptocurrency if it becomes truly effective. However, many others said it is not possible to kill crypto, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who recently suggested that governments should “do nothing” to regulate or control crypto.
Palihapitiya is of the opinion:
I think it’s very hard to kill [bitcoin]. Technically, it’s very difficult. Just the way that it’s architected, it is the most profound iteration of the internet that we’ve seen.
