Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius Network, is upgrading his Bitcoin price target.
On previous Kitco News appearances, Mashinsky had accurately predicted that Bitcoin would retrace $30,000 before climbing back to $70,000. Now, he sees the world’s largest cryptocurrency closing the year at $160,000.
“We may reach all the way to $160,000 this year. I’m sticking to that prediction,” Mashinsky told Michelle Makori, editor-in-chief of Kitco News.
El Salvador made history by being the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, and other countries are bound to follow, Mashinsky said.
“So if we can get a Brazil, if we can get a Nigeria, if we can get countries with large populations to accept this as legal tender… you’re going to see a huge explosion in the price because just the adoption of all those users is going to create tremendous new demand,” he said.
On the potential for influential figures like Elon Musk to move the Bitcoin market, Mashinsky said that Musk’s influence on the crypto space is waning.
“I call him a [Bitcoin] tourist because anybody who comes from fiat land to crypto land and is coming in here for the wrong reasons and then leaves for the wrong reasons, is a tourist,” he said. “He does have a very strong following worldwide, but inside the Bitcoin community his influence is waning.”
Mashinsky said that Musk has been publicizing Bitcoin for publicity reasons and not to help others generate wealth unlike those he calls “A plus ambassadors”
“Michael Saylor, Jack Dorsey, all the other people, you can see their conviction, you can see their understanding of the technical and the financial sides of this revolution,” said Mashinsky.
Mashinsky is the CEO and co-founder of Celsius a leading global cryptocurrency yield-earning platform which has also recently announced new investments of over $200 million in Bitcoin mining in North America through renewable resources. He addressed recent criticisms from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren that “Cryptocurrency has created opportunities to scam investors, assist criminals and worsen the climate crisis.”
“The arguments that Bitcoin is bad for the environment are just not true, if you want to build up new capacity, new, additional wind power, solar, hydro geothermal power, you need demand and what Bitcoin does better than almost anything else is that it creates that new demand renewable energy,” said Mashinsky.
Warren also criticized cryptocurrencies for their involvement with illegal financings.
“Crypto has become a haven for illegal activity. Unlike theft, drug trafficking, ransom attacks and other activities have all been made easier with crypto,” she said at a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing.
Mashinsky responded, “You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use a hammer to break the
windows. That does not make the hammer a good or bad thing. So, the technology behind the Bitcoin, the stable coins, blockchain, and open ledgers, that’s something that’s going to be with us forever. We can choose to use it as a hammer to break windows but all that’s going to do is allow other countries to move faster than us,” he said. “We can already see that China is five years ahead of the United States in creating a digital currency.”
For more on Mashinsky’s bitcoin price outlook and rebuttals to concerns raised by Senator Warren watch the video above.
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