Scaramucci’s Bitcoin Breakdown: $150K Prediction Sparks FOMO

James Connor 0:05
Hi and welcome to Wealthion, I’m James Connor. Bitcoin is up over 60% on the year so it’s an asset that I’m not familiar with. And I thought I should reach out to a few people to find out what’s going on and what’s really driving the price of Bitcoin and whether or not it’s an asset class that I should allocate money to. Today my guest is Anthony Scaramucci, the Founder and Managing Partner of Skybridge. Hi, Anthony Thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in New York?

Anthony Scaramucci 0:33
Sunny Day vinyle as well I got my shades the markets so bright I needed my shades

James Connor 0:39
Spring is in the air. Anthea, I want to pick your brain today a bow what’s happening in the Bitcoin market and I’m a traditional investor I invest in stocks and bonds and precious metals to some extent I know very little about cryptocurrency. So when I thought about getting educated on this sector, I thought about you and with the recent approval of Bitcoin ETFs by the SEC, we’ve seen significant moves in the in Bitcoin, it was up 170% in 2023, it’s already up 60% year to date. And I gotta be honest, I got some FOMO going on here. But I want to start right here. And maybe you can tell us what’s driving this bitcoin price?

Anthony Scaramucci 1:16
Well, I mean, let me let me just start out by saying and I’m going to implore you to do this is to do some research on Bitcoin, obviously, you’re a great securities analyst. So that would include reading the white paper. There’s a couple of great books on Bitcoin. One is by Safa Dean, almost called the Bitcoin standard, which explains the protocol and the network quite well. I wrote a short book called the sweet life of Bitcoin for my clients when I made my first Bitcoin investment in 2020. And I have empathy for you because I am a long term traditional finance institutionalist investor, self described, but I had my eureka moment on Bitcoin, back in 2020, when after speaking to Professor Neil Ferguson, who wrote the ascent of money, that Bitcoin, in fact, checks off the historical boxes, for things that people in the world of social sciences and anthropology that people would consider as a store of value. And remember, over time, we’ve used things like womp, bum gold coins, paper money, or in our case, cloth money, digits, electronically in a bank account. And remember, you know, double ledger accounting when it was invented four or 500 years ago, the banks have made money off of being an exotic spreadsheet for the world. And so Bitcoin, if you think of it from that point of view, technologically, it is actually a bank without third parties. And so it’s a fully distributed network, fully distributed spreadsheet, if you will, where we can keep track of value amongst ourselves without a third party authorization. And this is why they call the Bitcoin network trustless or permissionless. So I just want to start there, before we get into things like FOMO and things like that and so, so when you understand the network and I said this to Joe Kernan, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, you go towards the network when you understand the properties that Bitcoin has, why does somebody like a Bill Miller, legendary investor from Legg Mason outperform the stock market for 15 straight years mutual fund active manager? Why does he like Bitcoin? Why does Paul Tudor Jones like Bitcoin Stan Druckenmiller likes bitcoin is trying to select people that are way smarter than me that have bought into what I’m saying, Michael Novogratz, Prager, these guys like it, because of these properties. And then they say to themselves, okay, in a world of reckless money, where I think we could possibly stipulate on this, that central banks over the last 50 years, have more or less been drunk driving with our money. And so they expand the balance sheet. They have pressure from them for politicians who like to over promise people, and they want to over promise people that under tax people, and so what they end up doing is they print a tremendous amount of money. And this has devalued our money. And so we get our money from a third party, but our third party is drunk driving with the money and so Bitcoin allows us to take the keys away from the central bankers and create decentralized store of value or a decentralized transfer station amongst ourselves and when Pete To understand this, they say, Okay, I gotta find some of this. And they start to adopt it. And so where we are right now is we have about 5% adoption. And so in the United States has approximately 40 million wallets. Perhaps globally, there’s 80 or 90 million wallets. So the Bitcoin network is scaling exponentially. But it’s early stages, this would be equivalent to web one, when Amazon and AOL all those guys were in in the marketplace. This is sort of web 190 99. And if you understand it that way, you’re like, Okay, as this thing scales, it will rise in value, because it’s of scarce supply, can’t make any more of it. And this could become a store of value for people. And forget about you and me, let’s talk about people that are 15 or 20 years younger than us think about how facile people are that are 1520 30 years younger than us, with computers and the internet. Unfortunately, I grew up without a computer and without the Internet. And so as the world of digitization, continues to gain comfort demographically, I predict Dick Bitcoin will have even greater adoption. And so I’m fast forwarding now, the United States. Unfortunately, we have politicized our regulatory process here in the United States. And we have a group of left wingers like Elizabeth Warren, who I guess, I think her middle name is like Elizabeth Mao, as in Chairman Mao Warren. She tried to stop this technological innovation and she had her sidekick, Gary Gensler tried to stop it. And thankfully, the US still has a very fair and impartial court system. So they were beaten the courts and January for grudgingly this sort of politically contrived destitution, now known as the SEC, had to approve ETFs. Now, the two big ones are BlackRock and fidelity. But there are probably 11 In total, and you know, Wall Street, I know Wall Street, what ends up happening is, you get huge marketing, and huge engines of distribution. When Wall Street gets involved, I like to tell people that on wall street price gets sold, not bought. And so there’s engines going now at Fidelity engines going now at Blackrock which are selling the notion of Bitcoin in total return portfolios, and we’re seeing that to the tune of 500 or so billion dollars a day, since the start of the ETFs. And this has pushed the price up. So prices were at 35 40,000. At the beginning of the year, they hit an all time high at 68,000. And I’ll make a prediction here on this network, that Bitcoin will likely trade 250 or so 1000, if not more, over the next 12 to 18 months, because of the supply demand dynamics associated with it. But I would just implore people, it’s a volatile asset on a small piece of it. But please get started, you know, just own a little bit of it. The more you own, when you’ll have less FOMO, the more you own, you’ll have more of an intellectual curiosity, to want to learn more about it. And my bed is is going to be with us for a very, very long time. And as it scales, people will be like, Yeah, I’m glad I got in there early. And we are still very early, by the way.

James Connor 8:52
Yeah, I like I said earlier, I do have FOMO. Now a lot of the benefits associated with Bitcoin that you mentioned sounds very similar to the benefits of owning gold. And in fact, many people refer to Bitcoin and as new gold or digital gold. What are your thoughts on that?

Anthony Scaramucci 9:07
I accept that, you know, and I’m in that camp, by the way, there’s a very large group of people think it’s going to be the international currency standard, and replace the dollar. I don’t accept that. I think I think this is a form of digital gold. It’s immutable. It has a finite supply, which I think arguably does make it better than gold. And then the last piece of this, which I think is also important is it’s easier to transport than gold.

James Connor 9:35
Now, that’s a very good point. And now I’m somewhat curious too, because I think the demographics associated with investing in gold, they tend to be older people, right? Whereas Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies is a younger demographic, and we haven’t seen the price performance and gold that we have seen in cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin specifically. Last year, for example, gold was only up 10% But do you think this is the big issue? With the lack of performance and gold that this older generations are flowing to these cryptocurrencies?

Anthony Scaramucci 10:05
I do I do I think I think younger generations are saying, yeah, in remember, gold’s market price is only 5% attributed to his manufacturing value. We put our money in gold because other people perceive it to be a store of value. Remember what John Maynard Keynes said about markets. He said, It’s not my job. I’m like a beauty contest judge. It’s not my job to judge who is beautiful, but it’s my job to judge with the other judges think is beautiful. And so the younger people are judging Bitcoin to be better than gold.

James Connor 10:41
And when I look at Gold, okay, one of the things I like about it is the fact that I can hold it in my hand, right? Nobody can take it away from me. You can’t do that with Bitcoin.

Anthony Scaramucci 10:50
Okay, so I’ve had this existential debate with people, you can have a USB of Bitcoin, you know, one of my Saudi friends, basically said to me, you know, Anthony, you tell people, it’s digital gold, but it’s way better than gold. If I ever get in trouble in this in Saudi Arabia, I can’t move 100 $200 million of gold, but I got a $200 worth of bitcoin on a USB, I can hide it somewhere on my body and take it with me. And so you can actually, you know, it’s, it’s something, Jimmy that I would just recommend, please do some more homework on. When you understand it, you’ll recognize that there is a digital long term promise of digital long term value. I was where traditional investors, I won’t say you because I think you’re more enlightened than I perhaps ever was. But I would say I was an unenlightened, traditional finance investor. In 2016 1718, I started learning about Bitcoin at 19. And then by the end of 2020, I said, you know, what, I’m comfortable. Now. I understand this better, I’m going to make some investments in it.

James Connor 12:02
And another term I want to ask you about, I keep hearing about this halfing, I believe that’s the term that’s going to happen here in the coming months. Maybe you can just touch on that, what exactly that is, and what it’s going to do the to the bitcoin price?

Anthony Scaramucci 12:17
What I would say, is as it relates to the having the network, if you read the Satoshi Nakamoto, white paper, what he built into the process was, the network would pay you in bitcoins to help monitor the network. And so as I said, this is a distributed database, fully distributed, transparent ledger, you can log on to the Bitcoin network download as a software. And you can become one of the hall monitors on the transactions, okay, or you could basically govern a node for Bitcoin. And if you do that Bitcoin network will pay you in Bitcoin. And so right now the network is spitting out 900 bitcoins a day. But when it reaches a certain block, and that typically happens every four years, it shifts that supply down by half. And so four years ago, it was 1800 coins a day, and then click it went down to 900. on or about April 20, it will click down to 450. below what Nakamoto said in the white paper, I’m going to be offering you less coins. But if the network’s successful, these coins will be way higher in value than at previous times in the network. And that’s clearly happened. So this is programmable money. It’s only a 3000 word document, I would implore you to read it, and you’ll see the brilliance in it. And you’ll see why it’s going to be around here for a long period of time.

James Connor 13:52
Okay, well, that’s great. Listen, I know you’re tight for time. I want to ask you one more question before I let you go. You said earlier, your target price is $150,000. What’s the timeline associated with that target price?

Anthony Scaramucci 14:03
Yeah, so just put it simply, if you study this, if you study Bitcoin, every time there’s a halving, it goes up by from four acts from the date of the halving. And so I’m suggesting if it’s 60,000, April 20, that could be 240. But I’ve cut that down because I want to be conservative with people, you typically get four acts in 18 months from the halving. If you look at the demand coming in from these ETFs, if this just tracks gold, meaning you’ll get the same capitalization of the ETFs the combined ETS as the GLD ETF, this should easily be 150,000.

James Connor 14:52
Well, that’s great. Listen, I want to thank you very much for making time for us today. And I look forward to

Anthony Scaramucci 14:56
My pleasure. I’m sorry, in the back of the car, Jimmy You guys have a great weekend. All right, God bless.

James Connor 15:01
Alright, take care. Well, I hope you enjoyed that brief conversation with Anthony Scaramucci on Bitcoin and the benefits of owning cryptocurrencies. If you have any suggestions on who we should interview, please let us know in the comment section below. We’re always looking for new thought leaders. And if you’re trying to figure out how to prepare for your financial future, consider having a discussion with the Wealthion endorsed financial advisor at Wealthion.com After providing some brief information wellfield will put you in touch with a vetted advisor. There’s no obligation whatsoever to work with any of these advisors the free service at Wealthion offers to all of its viewers. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and leave a comment in the comment section below. Once again, thank you for spending time with us today and I look forward to seeing you again soon.