Bitcoin Investment Fund Manager: Wall Street Set to Plunge Into Digital Currency
Friday, 13 Dec 2013 09:53 AM
By Dan Weil
Investors are poised to plough major dollars into Bitcoin investments, says Barry Silbert, founder of such an investment vehicle — Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT).
BIT allows institutional investors to invest in bitcoins without holding the currency themselves.
"We launched six weeks ago and we're up to $70 million. That blows my mind. We were hoping to get to $10 million by the end of the year," Silbert said at a recent private dinner to discuss the currency, http://Entreprenreur.com reports.
He sees many more investors ready to take the plunge. "We're three to six months away from Wall Street dollars moving into Bitcoin in a big way," Silbert noted.
But in a sign of the digital currency's volatility, the value of BIT recently dipped to $63 million, according to http://Entrepreneur.com. The bitcoin traded Thursday at $892, down 7 percent from Wednesday.
Silbert expects "the price volatility is only going to get worse," in the near term. "We haven't seen anything yet."
He added, "Once Wall Street starts putting money into Bitcoin — we're talking about hundreds of millions, billions of dollars moving in — it's going to have a pretty dramatic effect on the price."
Silbert explained that some people already can use their individual retirement accounts to invest in bitcoins. And wealth-management divisions of Wall Street banks should offer bitcoin investment options soon, he added.
Hedge funds and other institutional investors will come next, Silbert says, and finally Wall Street banks will follow for themselves — in search of profits.
But some experts think the bitcoin is vastly overhyped.
"It's a bubble," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Bloomberg. "It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can."
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Poster Comment:
Bitcoin is indeed the digital currency of the future. Now, if I could only interest someone with money to back me up on it. ;)