Yahoo Finance Paul Tudor Jones makes bull case for bitcoin: 'The path forward from here is north'
Paul Tudor Jones is embracing a “hodl mentality” on Bitcoin (BTC-USD).
The cryptocurrency, which scaled a record high this week, is on a "crazy rocket ship ride” that’s set to go higher, according to the veteran investor and trader.
While Jones doesn't consider himself a cryptocurrency expert "by any stretch," he told Yahoo Finance that he expects the digital coin will be "substantially higher" in 20 years. On Thursday, Bitcoin — which has surged 113% since May — was trading north of $19,300 with a $359.37 billion market cap.
"In a world where you've got $90 trillion worth of equity market cap and God knows how many trillions of fiat currency, etcetera...it's the wrong market cap, for instance, relative to gold, which is $8 or $9 trillion," Jones said in an exclusive interview.
"I'm going to assume that it's the wrong price for the possibilities that it has. And I'm going to assume that the path forward from here is north," he added.
He added that Bitcoin reminds him of internet stocks in 1999 when the internet was in its infancy."No one knew how to value it because of the world of possibility that lay ahead," Jones said.
Back then, few had an idea of how the Internet would play out as some companies crashed and never came back. Others, however, ended up as dominant worldwide players.
"My guess is that's what we're going to sort through— that kind of crazy competition, winners and losers, et cetera in the digital world," Jones said.
‘The fastest horse’
In a May investor letter, the Tudor Investment Corp.'s founder and CIO provided a lengthy discussion in an investor memo on how Bitcoin can serve as an inflation hedge, as monetary expansion funds additional debt, which was already sky high before the pandemic hit.
At the time, Jones ranked Bitcoin as No. 4 on his list of inflation hedges, calling it an investable asset that falls into the category of a store of value and is semi-transactional. He noted that his profit-maximizing strategy was "to own the fastest horse" among the cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile, Jones is certain of is the digitization of money is the future, especially as more central banks move toward their own digital currencies. He predicted that current generations and sovereign governments will eventually use their own versions of crypto.
"They may have their own digital currency, whatever. They'll be very, very, very commonplace at that point in time. Cash may be gone,” he told Yahoo Finance. “And so in that world, where does Bitcoin fit in, as well as some of the other cryptocurrencies?" he asked.
If Jones had to guess, he thinks the future of Bitcoin is "going to be a lot like the metals complex," where you have ‘precious’ digital coin.
Bitcoin is “the first crypto, first-mover in a world that's so compressed. It has that historical integrity within digital currencies that it will always have …And again, because of its finite supply, that might be the precious crypto," he added.
What's more, the future might lend to more transactional cryptocurrencies along with the sovereigns' digital currencies.
"And they may be more like the industrial metals, so where you have gold as a precious metal, and then you've got copper and platinum, palladium, et cetera that are industrial — lead, aluminum, industrial metals. You may have precious crypto, and you may have industrial crypto," he said.
While it's impossible to know what the next 10 or 20 years will look like, Jones said if he had to take a position on it, it's going to be "the brand name," which is Bitcoin.
He also expects that sovereigns will fight back against cryptocurrencies, similar to what happened with gold in the 1930s when the federal government seized it.
"We were all actually on the gold standard because of its neutrality. And then, of course, we came off. They banned it. But it had appeal,” the investor explained.
“It's hard to understand what the future of a currency, any particular currency, is going to be," Jones added.
Julia La Roche is a correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.
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