With the price of bitcoin seemingly on the up and up, there’s no shortage of conversation on the topic of where the price goes from here. There’s seemingly no shortage of optimism, either, with the value of bitcoin up a whopping 18 percent in the past week.
Hedge fund Laureate BVI is taking part in that optimism, after issuing a speculative buy rating on the digital currency back in February.
“Whenever you have an instrument that trades over 300 million US dollars a day, it must be recognized,” says Laureate CEO Peter Tasca, according to Digital Journal. “The digital currency works, Bitcoin has greater volume transactions than Western Union and we anticipate it will overtake PayPal later this year.”
Over 1.2 million bitcoins (over $632 million) have been sent in the past twenty-four hours, according to data from bitcoinwatch.com.
Whether or not bitcoin will actually overtake PayPal is anyone’s guess at this point, but we have learned that the payments provider has hinted at integrating bitcoin into their services in a move that seems to recognize bitcoin as a competitor.
eBay CEO John Donahoe said in February that his company (who owns PayPal) is working on a digital wallet that can take multiple types of currency.
SmartMetric CEO Chaya Hendrick added that bitcoin has the potential to surpass transaction volumes of multinational financial outfits:
“In the next one or two years, Bitcoin can surpass the dollar transaction volumes of other established payment companies including Discover, and even American Express, MasterCard, and Visa,” he said.
Peter Tasca adds, “We’ve seen governments all over the world impose restrictions on the currency and that is good. In a free market economy this creates a safe trading environment and reduces the volatility Bitcoin holders have experienced in the last six months. This digital currency was meant to facilitate the exchange of currency to be spent, not traded.”
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Digital Journal
