-
Strategy CEO Michael Saylor has made a very aggressive forecast about where Bitcoin’s long-term price is headed.
-
His ambitious estimate isn’t as crazy as it sounds, for more than one reason.
Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Saylor is one of the most vocal of the Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) bulls out there, and in recent days, he made yet another series of incredibly optimistic predictions about the coin’s growth during the coming decades. Saylor says he expects the price of Bitcoin to rise at a 30% annual rate during the next 20 years, bringing its price into the ballpark of $13 million per coin.
For reference, its price is currently about $104,000, so Saylor’s projection appears to be, at least on its face, extraordinarily ambitious, bordering on fantastical, or perhaps even what some would describe as delusional.
Could he be right, or is this just another instance of another celebrity portfolio manager making lofty predictions in the course of “talking his book” to attract fresh capital for his most important investment?
During the past 10 years, the price of Bitcoin rose by 43,820%. That puts its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 84%; during the past five years, its CAGR was 62%. Therefore, the back-of-the-napkin math for Saylor’s predicted growth rate looks to be on the conservative side relative to the coin’s historical performance.
Let’s emphasize that point: Saylor’s forecast for Bitcoin is based on a scenario in which it would consistently perform significantly worse than it has historically. But will this growth actually happen?
If it does, it certainly won’t occur such that the coin’s price marches upward each year in an orderly fashion. Multiple crashes of as much as 80% have already happened in Bitcoin’s history, and similar plunges will probably happen again. Notably, the asset has recovered from all of those plunges so far and gone on to reach higher highs afterward. It’s more probable than not that it will repeat those patterns.
In the current era, there are also a handful of drivers for Bitcoin’s price that make it an attractive asset to hold even if it isn’t capable of growing by as much as Saylor is banking on. Governments, institutional investors, and major corporations are all evaluating whether to hold it on their balance sheets, or are already acquiring it. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are giving investors easier access to the asset. And that’s before even getting into the long-term drivers of its price performance, like its halving schedule and the scarcity that’s baked into the coin’s protocol.
