Even though billionaire investor and venture capitalist Tim Draper was clearly wrong when he predicted bitcoin (BTC) would reach $250,000 in June 2023, he said he still believes that it will happen eventually, maybe in 2025.
“I wasn’t really expecting for the U.S. bureaucracy to be this aggressive and I thought that maybe they would be recognizing that they got to compete with the rest of the world,” Draper admitted in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Tuesday.
He said that the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) recent enforcement actions against crypto companies, such as Coinbase and Binance, have been driving entrepreneurs out of the United States, which in turn has hurt the price of bitcoin.
But that doesn’t change how valuable bitcoin and its underlying technology are, according to Draper.
“It’s a great system, it’s great currency, it’s a great way to operate,” he said. “I can’t wait until I can raise a fund all in bitcoin, invest it all in bitcoin, have my portfolio companies all pay their employees and suppliers all in bitcoin and have taxes all paid in bitcoin, and have the waterfall all fall into people’s bitcoin wallets. Because then there’s no accounting, there’s no auditing, there’s no bookkeeping, it’s all done on the blockchain. It’s all honest and it’s all straight.”
Draper was one of the early advocates of crypto. He realized the significance of bitcoin in 2013 following the notorious collapse of the Mt. Gox crypto exchange, he said in an interview in 2014, in which he noted that he had bought 30,000 bitcoin after the incident.
Since then, he’s been a big investor in the cryptocurrency and projects related to it, leading multiple funding rounds for startups in the space.
In 2018, Draper first made the bold prediction that bitcoin would hit $250,000 in June 2023 and he stuck with that prognostication even through the recent bear market, up until now.
“So much for my prediction abilities,” Draper tweeted on June 30, admitting that bitcoin had only reached $30,000 at the time. “I guess we have to wait a little longer, (maybe 2 years) but engineers are hard at work.”