The probability of bitcoin prices falling to $100 is greater than that of the digital currency exchange at $100,000 a decade from now, Harvard University professor and economist Kenneth Rogoff intended on Tuesday.
“I think bitcoin will be worth a tiny fraction of what it is now if we’re headed out 10 years from now … I at ones desire see $100 as being a lot more likely than $100,000 ten years from now,” Rogoff recounted CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“Basically, if you take away the possibility of money washing and tax evasion, its actual uses as a transaction vehicle are very small,” the one-time chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said.
While bitcoin has been associated with illicit minutes, estimates of the proportion of the digital currency used in illegal activities diversify. Shone Anstey, the co-founder and president of Blockchain Intelligence Group, gauged that the floor of illegal transactions in bitcoin had fallen to 20 percent in 2016 and was “significantly lilliputian than that” in 2017.
Rogoff said that government regulation purposefulness be a trigger for the drop in bitcoin prices, although he stressed that it purpose take time to develop a global framework of regulation.
“It really constraints to be global regulation. Even if the U.S. cracks down on it and China cracks down, but Japan doesn’t, man will be able to still launder money through Japan,” he alleged.
Meanwhile, regulatory developments in the cryptocurrency landscape depend on individual fatherlands. Bitcoin was legalized as a currency by Japan last year and the country has also officially validated a number of cryptocurrency exchanges. But a massive theft of tokens worth $530 million in January saw dominions push for improvements.
South Korea, on the other hand, has implemented rules that cede to cryptocurrency trading only from real-name bank accounts.
Bitcoin traded approximately $11,242.61 during Tuesday Asia morning trade, according to assiduity site CoinDesk. The digital currency is down around 16 percent this year, keep fallen from a record high of more than $19,000 in December aftermost year.
But one reason authorities have been slow to act when it go about a find to regulating bitcoin is due to the anticipation of the technology behind the digital currency, according to Rogoff.
“They hankering to see the technology develop,” Rogoff said, adding that the private sector has historically “coined everything” in the history of currency, from standardized coinage to paper currency.
Bitcoin is fair-minded one application of blockchain technology, a term used to refer to distributed ledger technology that earmarks transactions to be recorded and maintained, which has been identified as a major parade of growth.
This is not the first time the economist has pointed to cryptocurrency assays falling. Before bitcoin sold off in December last year, Rogoff broke CNBC last October that prices of the digital currency resolve “collapse” amid attempts by governments to regulate the space.
— CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng supported to this report.