Bitcoin [BTC] is a dead-end; Ripple has a great future

During a discussion with Modern Wall Street, well-known influencers spoke about the gold market and its correlation with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin [BTC]. The key speakers were Jim Rickards, author of The Death of Money, Stephen Guilfoyle, the Founder of Sarge986 LLC, and economists Douglas Borthwick and David Williams.

The discussion began with the four speaking about the gold market and all the major countries such as China and Russia slowly shifting from the US dollar to gold. They further spoke about Swift being one of the main catalysts behind nations opting for gold and probably cryptocurrency because it is increasing the dominance of the US dollar.

However, Douglas Borthwick stood against the concept of Bitcoin [BTC] and stated that the people who are involved in Bitcoin clearly do not understand the mechanism of the macro environment. Douglas continued to say:

“I think that the holders of crypto or the holders of Bitcoin really have very little understanding of what’s going on in macro environment. They’re buying it because they see that’s the furture for a technology as opposed to folks buying and selling dollar, buying and selling gold to do that because they see this the future of macro-economics.”

They were further asked by Stephen Guilfoyle about Bitcoin being viewed as the new gold by the majority of the young investors. To this, Jim Rickards said that there is an approximate of 1600 cryptocurrencies which are listed on major exchange among which, some of them are small and some of them are fraud. However, he stated that Bitcoin is the biggest among them and that it is only used by tax evaders and terrorists.

He continued to say:

“It’ll get to $200 a coin which is kind of residual criminal value but all this stuff about, you know, six thousand dollars, that’s all nonsense.”

Jim Rickards stated that the dollar is a digital currency as a whole Fedwire system is digital and all the message traffic is encrypted. However, the only factor that makes cryptocurrency is the technology behind it which is absent with the dollar, digital distributed ledger [blockchain technology]. He further stated that the technology along with some currencies has a future.

However, he stated that Bitcoin is a dead-end and that it is not scalable and sustainable. They further added that it was the biggest bubble in the history in comparison to the Dutch tulip bubble.

David William stated that cryptocurrencies are transactional but he does not see that transactional value in Bitcoin. He further said that cryptocurrencies can be attacked by the governments and also shut down if there is no use-case like that of the dollar. However, people can not use Bitcoin as there is no stability in the transaction price.

However, Douglas Borthwick had a positive perspective on Ripple and the XRP currency, although he mistakenly referred to both of them as ‘Ripple’. He said:

“There are some cryptos that are working with regulators. Ripple would be an example. I can imagine in the next five years instead of doing sterling against the dollar or sterling against the yen, I can see these transfer transactions with sterling versus Ripple.

He further said:

“The reason being dollar right now is a two day settlement with something like Ripple, you could do settlement in seconds. I think that there’s a future there where the guy that’s trading in spot FX today will be trading spot FX against Ripple in the next two or three years. So, I think Ripple has a great future because right now it is supported by all the banks and all the regulators.”

Moreover, Jim stated that Satoshi did not think about monetary economics while creating Bitcoin. This is because as the demand increases, the supply should also increase. Whereas with Bitcoin, there are a limited number of coins which would mean that in the future when the demand increases for the coin, there will not be enough coins to meet the demand.

According to him, the money supply has to grow “a little” as the economy is growing and since Bitcoin cannot do that after reaching its cap, it would result in deflation and when borrowed, people would have to pay more as the value would keep increasing in the long-term.