Teeka Tiwari: Bitcoin Will Be a Check Against Money Printing

Teeka Tiwari, editor of a financial newsletter from the Palm Beach Research Group — and advertising sponsor of Breitbart News — said Monday that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will likely become checks against central banks’ printing of money.

“[Bitcoin] will be a check against central banks’ reckless money printing,” Tiwari said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “We had nowhere else to go. Central banks can print money as much as they want [and] they can dilute the dollars down, but if Bitcoin becomes what I believe it will be — essentially, an alternative source of value that people can flee to when their countries are debasing their currency — then it now becomes a direct competitor to central banks.”

Competitive market forces incentivize better behavior, Tiwari noted. He said, “When you have competition, what happens? You generally get better behavior, lower prices, and more value for your money.”

Bitcoin’s valuation rose following speculation of Amazon’s adoption of cryptocurrencies. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The price of [bitcoin] jumped to a six-week high Monday, with some investors attributing the rally to short positions being liquidated and speculation that Amazon . com Inc. may be venturing into digital currencies.

Bitcoin soared as high as $40,501.70, according to Dow Jones Market Data, reaching its highest level since mid-June. It rose 9% from its 5 p.m. EDT level Sunday. Rival currency Ether jumped 4.8%.

Tiwari predicated widespread expansion of bitcoin’s usage across large technology companies.

“It is a foregone conclusion that every major Internet platform — whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google — will have to, at some point, integrate bitcoin into their offering, and not just bitcoin, but other cryptocurrencies, as well,” he said.

Tiwari added, “Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, I think everyone deserves and appreciates and values sovereign property rights, and that’s what bitcoin gives you. It gives you the ability to own and custody your property in a way that no other asset except gold offers, except bitcoin is infinitely more usable than gold because you can break it down into tiny pieces.”

“You don’t just have to buy a whole bitcoin or spend a whole bitcoin,” he continued. “It’s divisible down to 100 of a millionth of a unit. You can send it anywhere in the world to anybody that has a smartphone, and they’ll get it in about ten minutes. It’s incredibly easy to use. It’s cheap. It’s easier to store, and you can go anywhere in the world with it. You can have a billion dollars of bitcoin in your smartphone. Try doing that with gold.”

Bitcoin’s decentralization is one of its key strengths, he maintained. “What I love about bitcoin is that it is a monetary system that no one individual can manipulate or control, and that’s the beauty of bitcoin.”

Bitcoin’s volatility is a function of it still being a novel and misunderstood concept, Tiwari held.

He explained, “The fact is, when you have a new asset that is little understood [and] is in the hands of inexperienced people, it will be volatile. That was true for Microsoft in its early days of the 1980s when people didn’t even understand what Microsoft DOS was, what the value was, or they didn’t believe that PCs would be a thing.”

He continued, “It was true of Apple in the early 2000s when people couldn’t understand the value of the iPod and then of the phone that they had created. People like [former President Barack] Obama were calling it a toy. They didn’t understand it. It was going to change the world.”

“Amazon shocked 90, 80, 70 percent more times than I can count in the early days of its life,” he recalled. “People could not understand how that could transform into the behemoth that it is today. So when you have something transformational, you have many people that don’t really understand it.”

Bitcoin is still in its infancy relative to future growth and adoption, Tiwari determined.

“It’s still very much early days in bitcoin,” he stated. “I remember when I recommended bitcoin at $428. People told me I was crazy, that this ship had sailed, because bitcoin had been a hundred dollars, just a few years earlier.”

“A few years before that, ][itcoin] was $10, and a year before that at seven cents,” he shared. “So people couldn’t understand how I could, in all good conscience, recommend bitcoin at $400. They said the same thing to me at $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. In my opinion, over the next five years, a bitcoin will be worth over a half a million dollars.”