10 Long-Term BTC Price Predictions by Finance Gurus (2023)

This article will examine the Bitcoin price predictions of many experts in the broad finance and investment industry.

Methodology: Experts were selected with a breadth of understanding and reputation in the financial industry.

Disclaimer: This is 100% subjective, and we neither recommend buying or selling BTC as a result of this study. We are no financial professionals or gurus—our own prediction is only a subjective addition to the expert opinions, but we don’t consider ourselves financial experts.

Data Overview

Here’s a quick overview of different long-term BTC price predictions discussed in this article:

💡 This is a great example of the significant difference between the median and average of a financial dataset!

• The median BTC price prediction is $476,000 per Bitcoin.
• The average BTC price is an order of magnitude higher at $4,725,636 per Bitcoin.

This graphic is based on the following raw data:

Michael Saylor: $15,000,000 per Bitcoin (2020-2022)

Highlights from Saylor’s argument:

• Demonetizing gold ($11 Trillion USD market cap) brings the Bitcoin price to roughly $500,000 USD.
• There is $400 Trillion USD in common stock, bonds, and cash. Half of which is seeking a store of value as a container. For example, people buy the S&P 500, gold, real estate, bonds, or farmland to preserve their value.
• There are $100 Trillion USD of sovereign debt, of which $17 Trillion USD is negative-yielding.
• People need and want a safe-haven asset.
• The amount of monetary energy in the world looking for a safe-haven asset is between $100 and $300 Trillion USD.
• Bitcoin will get a portion of the asset values of gold, land, real estate, stocks, and bonds.

If Bitcoin gets $100 Trillion USD from other assets, the price of a single Bitcoin will be $100,000,000,000,000/21,000,000BTC = $4,761,904/BTC.

This is roughly $5,000,000 for a single BTC in a couple of years.

If Bitcoin gets $400 Trillion USD from other assets (e.g., asset inflation increases total USD-value of other asset classes), the price of a single Bitcoin will be $400,000,000,000,000/21,000,000BTC = $19,047,619/BTC.

This is roughly $19,000,000 for a single BTC in a couple of years.

Peter Schiff: $0 per Bitcoin (2017-2022)

Peter Schiff is a long-term Bitcoin critic. He argues that Bitcoin is nothing but a bubble. He made this argument for years.

For example, he predicted Bitcoin would crash to $1,000 per BTC in the short-term after 2019 when it rallied to $60,000 in the following 2 years.

In 2017, he predicted Bitcoin wouldn’t be able to hold the $4,000 per BTC level.

Schiff’s argument is that he doesn’t know how high the bubble will go, he only knows that it’ll eventually pop.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss: $476,000 per Bitcoin (2019-2022)

The Winklevoss twins have been involved in creating and ideation of the social network giant Facebook. After suing Facebook’s founder Zuckerberg and getting a multi-million USD settlement, they started to invest heavily in Bitcoin back in May 2013 with their base thesis of Bitcoin eventually hitting the market cap of gold due to its superiority in terms of monetary properties such as fungibility, supply cap, transferability, saleability, divisibility, and verifiability.

The market cap of gold is roughly $10 Trillion, which would yield a bitcoin price prediction of at least $476,000 per Bitcoin.

When did Winklevoss invest Bitcoins?In May 2013, they invested $1.5 million in a Brooklyn based exchange called BitInstant, which charged people a fee to exchange dollars for Bitcoin in just minutes. The business grew rapidly—reportedly accounting for 30% of all Bitcoin purchases.

Warren Buffett: $0 per Bitcoin (2019-2022)

Warren Buffett has been asked about Bitcoin frequently in many interviews and at his annual shareholder meetings.

Buffett doesn’t believe in what he calls “unproductive assets” like gold and Bitcoin that don’t produce anything. While he didn’t exactly predict that the price of Bitcoin would hit $0, he often said that the Bitcoin mania would end badly, and he even said that Bitcoin is “Rat Poisson Squared”.

He also argued that there will be no compounding due to the fact that Bitcoin is unproductive. So, he certainly doesn’t believe that the long-term value of Bitcoin will appreciate faster than stocks, generally speaking.

In fact, he compared Bitcoin to the tulip bubble that ended at a tulip price of essentially $0.

Charlie Munger: $0 per Bitcoin (2019-2022)

“Bitcoin is stupid cause it’s very likely to go to zero,” says Charlie Munger

He also thinks it’s “evil because it undermines the federal reserve system which we desperately need”.

Finally, he argues that “it makes us look foolish compared to China who was smart enough to forbid it”.

Peter Thiel: $4,000,000 per Bitcoin (2022)

Peter Thiel is one of the smartest billionaire technology investors in the world. He was an early investor in many highly successful companies such as Facebook and PayPal.

Thiel argues that in the year 1980, the value of all gold was at parity with all the global equities. Now, global equities have 10x the value of gold.

As today’s world looks more like the 1970s, he argues that there may be parity between gold/Bitcoin and equities. And Bitcoin will eat most of the gold market cap, according to Thiel.

So, in the Bitcoin 2022 conference talk, Thiel argues that there is a 100-to-1 opportunity from the $40,000 price level. This leads to a total Peter Thiel valuation of $4,000,000 per BTC.

Bill Gates: Less Than $30,000 per Bitcoin (2021)

Bill Gates is “not bullish on Bitcoin”. Nonetheless, he thinks that digital money solutions are the future, and it will eventually get to even the poorest countries.

In a 2021 interview, he described the price of Bitcoin as randomly swinging up or down without anybody being able to predict it. At the time, the price was in the $30,000 to $60,000 range.

As he mentioned that he’s not very optimistic about the Bitcoin price, this can be seen as a call for the lower end of this spectrum, i.e., $30,000 per BTC.

In 2018, Bill Gates even said that “I agree I would short it if there was an easy way to do it,” CNBC

In fact, the price of BTC went from roughly $10,000 to $3,000 in the year 2018, so Gates’ short play is likely to would have worked in the short term.

However, I don’t think that this could actually be used as a long-term prediction of the Bitcoin price by Bill Gates. A more reasonable interpretation of Gates’ views would be the above $30,000 per Bitcoin price prediction as a more bearish bet on the randomly fluctuating Bitcoin price—without acknowledging long-term appreciation (much like Warren Buffett’s argumentation).

CEO of Binance – “CZ” Changpeng Zhao: $1,000,000 per Bitcoin (2021)

“CZ” is the CEO of the largest cryptocurrency platform in the world, Binance. He’s one of the richest billionaires in the world, and he’s one of the few experts in the crypto space on this list.

As he doesn’t come from “outside” the crypto world, he has much more knowledge than, say, Warren Buffett about the Bitcoin ecosystem. Of course, this also makes him vulnerable to biases. But then again, who doesn’t have a bias?

Michael Burry: $0 per Bitcoin (~2020)

Allegedly, he wrote in a tweet that:

“$BTC is a speculative bubble that poses more risk than opportunity despite most of the proponents being correct in their arguments for why it is relevant at this point in history,” — GoBankingRates

Finxter: $31,000,000 per Bitcoin Valuation Thesis (2022)

Full Article: The $31,000,000 Bitcoin Valuation Thesis

Valuation thesis: Bitcoin will replace the SWIFT bank-to-bank settlement protocol.

This means that a transaction volume of approximately $1825 trillion goes through the SWIFT network on a yearly basis.

This means that the Bitcoin network can handle 3.6 million transactions per year. Each transaction can have an arbitrary settlement value as determined by the price of Bitcoin and the average number of Bitcoins per transaction.

If Bitcoin replaces SWIFT as a means to settle bank-to-bank transactions, it would have to transact $1825 trillion with 3.6 million transactions in a given year. This means that the average per-transaction value is $506,944,444. Let’s make it $500 million.

As more and more dollar volume will be transacted due to an inflation of fiat currency, this number is likely to increase over time.

To move $500 million in a single transaction, we have to look at the average transaction size in BTC, how much BTC is moved per transaction?

• If 1 BTC is moved per average transaction, we’d get a price of $500 million per BTC.
• If 10 BTC are moved per average transaction, the price would be $50 million per BTC.
• If 100 BTC are moved per average transaction, the price would have to be at least $5 million per BTC.

You can read more about this argument and valuation thesis in our full article.

Full Article: The $31,000,000 Bitcoin Valuation Thesis

References

[1] This code was used to generate the chart:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import math

data = [15000000,
        0,
        476000,
        476000,
        0,
        0,
        4000000,
        30000,
        1000000,
        0,
        31000000]

labels = ['Saylor',
          'Schiff',
          'C. Winklevoss',
          'T. Winklevoss',
          'Buffett',
          'Munger',
          'Thiel',
          'Gates',
          'CZ (Binance)',
          'Burry',
          'Finxter']

sorted_data = sorted(zip(data, labels), key=lambda x: x[0])
data = [x[0] for x in sorted_data]
labels = [x[1] for x in sorted_data]

median = np.median(data)
average = np.average(data)
print(median, average)
n = len(data)

plt.plot(range(n), [median] * n, color='black', label='Median: $' + str(int(median)))
plt.plot(range(n), [average] * n, '--', color='red', label='Average: $' + str(int(average)))
plt.bar(range(len(data)), data)
plt.xticks(range(len(data)), labels, rotation='vertical', color='black', weight='bold')
plt.ylabel('BTC Price Prediction ($)')
plt.yscale('log')
plt.title('Bitcoin Price Predictions by Experts | Finxter')
plt.legend()
plt.grid()
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()