The Ledger: Bitcoin Predictions, Tim Draper, Elon Musk Crypto Ads

Two-thirds of The Ledger team—including me and Robert Hackett—were in Lisbon, Portugal last week for the massive Web Summit conference, where we spent much of our time talking blockchain and fintech (in between samplings of the city’s delicious egg tarts, pasteis de nata).

I had the opportunity to interview two people who made some of the boldest predictions about cryptocurrency prices over the past year: Tim Draper, the DFJ venture capitalist, who predicted that the Bitcoin price would hit $250,000 by 2022, and Peter Smith, the CEO and cofounder of wallet company Blockchain, who thought the total market value of cryptocurrencies would reach $1 trillion in 2018 (the current figure stands at about $212 billion).

Naturally, I wanted to know if they were standing by their predictions some eleven months into the cryptocurrency bear market, with Bitcoin’s price hovering around $6,400, nearly 70% below its peak.

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