Pantera Capital CEO, Dan Morehead Says Bitcoins Are Here To Stay

By Rishma Banerjee

Dan Morehead, The CEO of Pantera Capital, a bitcoin investment firm, recently said that disruptive technologies usually earn the term of being “category killers”. However, he feels that bitcoins will earn the title “serial killer”. This is because it will ultimately disrupt dozens of sectors when it has already been showing the potential to control some major sub-sectors of the financial industry. Morehead, in am interview with Bloomberg said,

“It’s great at cross-border money movement… it’s great at storing your wealth especially if you live in a country with depreciating currency or capital controls…”

Morehead says that “over the next decades” bitcoins will become more and more mainstream and it will be possible to use it for making everyday transactions like coffee purchases. He also noted that even though the internet nhad been able to disrupt several sectors since decades now, the financial sector had been left more or less untouched. However, through peer-to-peer transactions, bitcoins will soon render banks, credit cards and remittance forms null and void.

The only barrier to the worldwide adoption of bitcoins, that Morehead talks about in the interview is the difficulty in acquiring it and the lack of user friendly services and exchanges to facilitate that. He however said,

“Right now the exchanges are a bit clunky… they are a little bit expensive… but the fees are coming down pretty quickly…” Morehead noted.

Pantera Capital’s boss also observed that one of the biggest challenges currently facing bitcoin is scalability as the number of transactions per second is limited to single digits. Morehead, however, expressed optimism that this would be solved:

He also spoke about how the scalability and the number of transactions per second which is limited to single digits maybe of massive inconvenience.

“So the next couple of years are all about scaling these blockchains so that they are able to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second or even hundreds of thousands…”

He however points out that the number of users of bitcoins have grown by leaps and bounds which serves as a positive indicator of the fate of bitcoins.

“Six or eight years ago there was probably a million people on earth using it, now there are 50 million people that use it… I think in a decade it’s going to be billions of people using it…”

Moreover, multi national corporations have jumped right into the cryptocurrency and blockchain market, which also prompts the believe that these are somethings worth investing in.

“…Multinational corporations are embracing blockchain. IBM … just saw an ad for Walmart saying they are going to do lettuce on the blockchain… and stock exchanges doing bitcoin exchange… Fidelity is doing crypto custody… so it’s now reached a kind of mainstream adoption…”