Are you worried it’s too late to buy Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC)? Although the pace of some of the cryptocurrency’s previous run-ups may be difficult to match, there is still plenty of room for it to grow. But just how much?
If you believe Michael Saylor, the outspoken chief of MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), the answer is a whole lot. Known for his bold and fearless Bitcoin advocacy, Saylor isn’t shy about setting high price targets. His latest? That Bitcoin will reach $13 million by 2045 — a potential gain of 18,600% from today’s price.
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Under Saylor’s direction, the company made Bitcoin a core part of its business. MicroStrategy began as a software company — it still is one — but in 2020 it began amassing a reserve of Bitcoin as a central strategy for growth. It now owns about 250,000 bitcoins valued at more than $16 billion. The company spent just under $10 billion buying them — a pretty nice deal. Investors appear to believe this is a winning strategy; the stock is up nearly 2,000% since the Bitcoin buying began despite the company’s software revenue barely growing since then.
He’s betting the farm, so to speak, on the success of Bitcoin, but it’s clear he believes in the strategy wholeheartedly. Why? Saylor sees it as combining the best of a range of assets like currency, gold, and real estate. For one, it is scarce. There is a fixed amount of Bitcoins that can ever be mined and it’s becoming harder to extract new ones. This makes it a deflationary asset, meaning that its value tends to rise over time because of its limited supply. This is in direct contrast to currencies like the dollar which are, by design, inflationary.
Gold works similarly, but Bitcoin has a few major advantages over the precious metal; namely, it can be easily stored and exchanged. MicroStrategy can store $16 billion worth of Bitcoin running a few servers. Can you imagine the cost of storing $16 billion worth of gold?
Bitcoin is secure and decentralized — a vast network of computers around the world work together to make it so. Theoretically, no single entity can disrupt this or put its thumb on the scale to influence the value of Bitcoin like a central bank can with a currency.
These more ideological reasons are well and good, but at the end of the day, the market has proven that Bitcoin holds tremendous value. Bitcoin is by far the most widely adopted digital asset and at this point, it looks like it will be incredibly difficult to unseat. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but with the influx of institutional capital during the past few years, it doesn’t seem likely.
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