With the price of bitcoin seemingly on the up and up, there’s no shortage of conversation on the topic of where the price goes from here. There’s seemingly no shortage of optimism, either, with the value of bitcoin up a whopping 18 percent in the past week.
Hedge fund Laureate BVI is taking part in that optimism, after issuing a speculative buy rating on the digital currency back in February.
“Whenever you have an instrument that trades over 300 million US dollars a day, it must be recognized,” says Laureate CEO Peter Tasca, according to Digital Journal. “The digital currency works, Bitcoin has greater volume transactions than Western Union and we anticipate it will overtake PayPal later this year.”
Over 1.2 million bitcoins (over $632 million) have been sent in the past twenty-four hours, according to data from bitcoinwatch.com.
Whether or not bitcoin will actually overtake PayPal is anyone’s guess at this point, but we have learned that the payments provider has hinted at integrating bitcoin into their services in a move that seems to recognize bitcoin as a competitor.
eBay CEO John Donahoe said in February that his company (who owns PayPal) is working on a digital walletthat can take multiple types of currency.
SmartMetric CEO Chaya Hendrick added that bitcoin has the potential to surpass transaction volumes of multinational financial outfits:
“In the next one or two years, Bitcoin can surpass the dollar transaction volumes of other established payment companies including Discover, and even American Express, MasterCard, and Visa,” he said.
Peter Tasca adds, “We’ve seen governments all over the world impose restrictions on the currency and that is good. In a free market economy this creates a safe trading environment and reduces the volatility Bitcoin holders have experienced in the last six months. This digital currency was meant to facilitate the exchange of currency to be spent, not traded.”
Related Posts
- 87The website of Mt. Gox appears to be taken down, shortly after six major Bitcoin exchanges released a joint statement distancing themselves from the troubled Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange. Mt. Gox's homepage was not loading, although no error message appeared. Mt. Gox was not immediately available for comment. "This tragic violation…
- 86Bitcoin prices are all out of whack. Mtgox cratering. pic.twitter.com/exe8Bwl6cG
- 86Who cares about Satoshi Nakamoto? Someone else has made Bitcoin what it is and has the most power over its destiny. In March, a bewildered retired man faced journalists yelling questions about virtual currency outside his suburban home in Temple City, California. Dorian Nakamoto, 64, had been identified by Newsweek as the…
- 86The price of the digital currency bitcoin slid to its lowest level in nearly two months on Monday after bitcoin digital marketplace Mt. Gox said a halt on withdrawals it announced on Friday would continue indefinitely after it detected "unusual activity." http://www.reuters.com
- 84Mark Karpeles, chief executive of Mt. Gox, the embattled Toyko-based bitcoin exchange, resigned on Sunday from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, in the latest blow to the digital currency. Jinyoung Lee Englund, a spokesperson for the Bitcoin Foundation - a trade group promoting the adoption of the digital currency,…