Bitcoin [BTC] might go to “Zero”, say prominent people in the industry

Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, Jeff Schumacker, the CEO and founder at BCG Digital Ventures, Glen Hutchins, co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, and Edith Yeung, partner at 500 startups, spoke at a panel in World Economic Forum 2019 at Davos on January 22, 2019 on various topics related to blockchain and fintech.

Jeff Schumacher addressed his previous prediction about Bitcoin going to zero and said that Bitcoin as a currency was not based on anything, but added that he liked the technology behind it. He continued:

“if it became the standard currency and because of the Proof-of-Work model that it sits on; if it got to be the gold standard… if Bitcoin was pegged against gold standard which is about seven trillion-ish dollars it would be responsible for 20% of the world’s co2 production. So just by that alone tells you it’s not it’s not gonna be the go-forward thing, at least for my view.”

Glenn Hutchins said that he wasn’t interested in investing in Bitcoin as a form of currency equivalent, but in the underlying protocol and what it does. He added:

“I don’t think you can make any judgment about the potential for this industry as a consequence of what happened to the value of the tokens over the last 12 months. I think that’s just wrong-headed thinking, but the way to think about the value of the tokens is as the derivatives of the use value of the protocols that they enable.”

Furthermore, he said that he agreed partly with Jeff Schumacher and said that Bitcoin will not be the major coin in the industry. Hutchins went on to say that Bitcoin has a chance to become a store of value since it works on a PoW and it was “the most decentralized and most secure, it could be the place where we could store value.”

Brad Garlinghouse said that he was also in agreement with the rest on the fact that the longterm value of any digital asset or token would be derived from the utility that it delivers.

Garlinghouse said:

“I agree with Jeff that, if you take Bitcoin as it exists today as a static thing, the scalability problems and proof of work as a model has some real significant limitations. There are lots of people trying to improve that, maybe they’ll be successful, maybe they won’t.”

Moreover, Garlinghouse continued saying that he was not prepared to say that Bitcoin was going to zero and that he still owns a lot of Bitcoin. In addition, he agreed with Glenn on Bitcoin becoming a store of value.