Tim Draper who has been investing in future technology since the earliest days of the web said that in five years no one will be trading with fiat currency. The legendary investor and prognosticator of where technology is taking us sat down with CNBC’s Fast Money to talk about the future of Bitcoin and blockchain technology.
Greatest Technological Change
Draper said the shift that is happening in technology today is bigger than the iron or bronze age. When asked how he compared the opportunities now to when he was investing in web 1.0 and 2.0 he talked about how the web transformed information. But now blockchain technology has the potential to change almost every industry including the way government works.
He sees individual governments breaking down in the future to become a group of international entities that will compete by supplying their services to citizens.
When asked to compare where blockchain development is now as compared to the way the internet was developed, he put the timeline at the early eighties for investor potential, saying “it is all just getting started.” “This is the most excited I’ve ever been as an investor, and I was right there at the beginning of the internet,” he added.
Talking about the future of currency Draper stated that in five years fiat currency will be a thing of the past. There will be no more currencies linked to specific countries.
“In five years you’re going to walk in and try to pay fiat [a government-backed currency like the U.S. dollar] for a Starbucks coffee, and the barista is going to laugh at you, because they’re going to say, ‘What is this? Are you counting out pennies? Give me shells?’
Whether Draper knows this or not, Starbucks has indicated that it may use blockchain technology for an application that will process consumer payments in cryptocurrency.
The End of Fiat Currency
When asked what he would do with a fresh dollar for investment, whether that would be for an ICO or existing currency, Draper directly talked about the dominance of Bitcoin in the future. That he saw other cryptocurrencies falling away leaving Bitcoin as the standard.
He ended by talking about the Bootcamp he is launching in April at his Draper university to encourage learning and investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. “Because all of this engineering effort, all that excitement, this focus is really on bitcoin and all of the cryptos around it,”
Draper, who is known to have predicted when Bitcoin would hit the $10,000 mark almost to the day, was an early investor in Skype and Tesla. He bought and is still holding 30,000 Bitcoins from the 2014 US Marshals Service auction of assets seized from the Silk Road.
