Video length: 00:13:55

Transcript

Daniela Cambone: Is Bitcoin (BITCOMP) heading back to its highs and will it ever replace gold as the ultimate commodity. James welcome to the show. Good to have you in studio.

James Altucher: Daniela, thanks for having me here. By the way your voice was an octave higher when you started talking to the camera.

Daniela Cambone: It's the anchor voice.

James Altucher: Yes. Octave higher increases likeability octave lower increases trust-worthiness.

Daniela Cambone: OK. So let me find a medium ground here. That is a good tip. James thank you so much. First time you’re on here. Let’s talk about the rally behind bitcoin. Everyone wants to know: could we see those highs we once hit?

James Altucher: Sure. I mean there’s a short term story and a long term story. The long term story I’ve described in a lot of places. August 2017, I described the long story on CNBC, how crypto currencies solves in general, many of the problems of paper currencies and fiat money which you’re familiar with. The fact that there’s so many banks and fees and there’s so much potential for human error. When the Federal Reserve or the central bank prints more money there’s potential for forgery. There’s privacy issues, etc. So crypto currency solves a lot of the problems of fiat money. And that long term story is still intact. So long term, it’s just all crypto currencies that are safe and not scams are going to go up. And again in the prior interview I mentioned, I said ninety five percent of crypto currencies are scams. That was in August 2017 and about 80 percent of cryptocurrency since then have gone to zero. So that’s been proven mostly correct. In terms of a short term rally, there’s so many problems right now with Iran with China and these tariff wars that are happening, Brexit issues... So people are getting afraid of the currencies that they own.

So there’s kind of a flight into other types of currencies like Bitcoin or like gold. So gold had had a mini rise but bitcoin is gone up quite a bit, it’s gone from like $6,000 to $9,000 during this time. And I think there’s more to it, it’s a flight to safety (Bitcoin). And also there’s a lot of companies now announced they were going to be accepting and so Whole Foods is accepting it. You know many companies are accepting it. Salesforce.com just announced they’re using blockchain technology.

Daniela Cambone: While a lot of people would say that this run up is thanks to the institutional players coming on board, U.S. online brokerages that are looking to offer Bitcoin in 2019, so do you agree with that statement, that that’s really the force here?

James Altucher: Yeah, that’s certainly part of it. Think about a year ago, the FCC started saying "no no no, you know we need to look at this." I thought that was a great sign. Now Bitcoin collapsed after that. But you want your regulators to kick out all the scams. You want some cleansing of any sort of financial innovation. So now finally they’re starting to get ready to announce ETF. Fidelity is going to start having an exchange for it..."

Daniela Cambone: Right, And that’s where you have said that you actually see regulation as a good thing. But let’s talk about the 2001 interview you did. You also mentioned that you wouldn’t be surprised if Bitcoin could possibly go to a million dollars by 2020.

James Altucher: Well also I’ll explain the math. So if if crypto currencies or let’s say Bitcoin ends up replacing paper currency, and it solves so many problems of paper currency, it should partially or completely replace paper currency in the long run. How much paper currency is out there?. It’s about two hundred trillion dollars worth of paper currency is in the world and there’s only about two hundred billion dollars of cryptocurrency. So that’s one hundred thousand percent from here. You know that could give bitcoin a price of I don’t know, eight million dollars. So one million dollars is even a discount to where a bitcoin could eventually go. Now when it actually gets there who knows. It could be soon. It could be later. But but the general direction has been up.

Daniela Cambone: So you’re sticking to that call.

James Altucher: Well since I’ve made that call Bitcoins up something like 150%. So as long as the direction is good and you’re making money nobody should complain. Will it hit a million dollars in 2020? Maybe. Will it be 2021, 2022? Who knows, at some point some country's currency is going to collapse, who knows which country, maybe Argentina, Iran, many countries in South America are potential, some currency will collapse. The population of that country will say let’s all move to bitcoin. And then you are going to see mass adoption. In addition to all the things you mentioned, more stores will accept it. Amazon is starting to accept it, Fidelity is starting to issue it to customers, all the online brokerages are issuing it to customers, the SEC approving it...

Daniela Cambone: What can you tell us about the volume behind this runup? There have been reports that some of the volume is fake, it's not real.

James Altucher: Sure, so I think that was the same think that was said a year ago and was probably true a year ago. But look, a lot of the trading in stocks, any kind of trading, some of it is fake or algorithmic, its not different from any sort of financial asset.Gold a lot of the trading is fake. But what's happening now is very real. There's more billionaires in China than in the entire Forbes billionaire list. There's so many privately known billionaires in China, What are they doing with their yuan which is in trouble now becomes of this tariff war?All these billionaires and wealthy people of China, or Iran and other countries, are concerned and are moving their currency into Bitcoin. It's easy to move, it's not trackable, it's private... So I think we're seeing right now a large movement of wealth in crypto. Also we might be seeing huge mutual fund companies like Fidelity starting to gather Bitcoin for their online exchanges and products and so on.

Daniela Cambone: Do you think there's manipulation in Bitcoin?

James Altucher: No, I mean maybe the final run-up to $20,000 at the end of 2017 there was some manipulation. But the long term story is intact. Like, $20,000 is a huge discount from where the underlying value of Bitcoin will be in the long term.