American investor Bill Miller says Bitcoin’s (BTC) fabled bull run is only getting started despite the asset’s nearly 700% price increase in the past year, a report on news outlet CNBC stated today.
Miller is famed for beating SP-500 index returns over a 14-year period—from 1991 to 2005—a feat that made him one of the top money managers in the world. He manages billions of dollars at the Miller Value Fund (MVF) and is known for his value-based approach to equity markets.
#Bitcoin supply is growing 2% a year and demand is growing faster.
That’s all you really need to know, and that means it’s going higher.
– Bill Miller, hedge fund manager
— Bitcoin Archive ??? (@BTC_Archive) April 20, 2021
A long-time Bitcoin trader
Miller is no newbie to Bitcoin. He started a BTC-only fund back in 2018, revealing at the time that MVF had been buying the asset when it traded at $350.
And that conviction remains. In a CNBC interview on Tuesday, Miller said Bitcoin was firmly entering the ‘mainstream’ market and that its recent price rally was ‘significantly different’ from the 2017 cycle, one that ended in a bust.
“Supply [of Bitcoin] is growing 2% a year and demand is growing faster. That’s all you really need to know, and that means it’s going higher,” he said, suggesting the asset still had room to run to the upside.
The words are not wholly because Miller’s an early investor. He argues that 2017 was ‘a bubble that ultimately burst,’ but that this time marks the “beginning of a mainstreaming of it.”
For those who didn’t keep track, Bitcoin rose thousands of percent in 2017 in a rally that topped out at $20,000. It was, however, followed by a bust to under $6,000 in the months after, before culminating into a nearly two-year-long bear market.
Volatility remains a concern
The bullishness and future price predictions aside, Miller says Bitcoin’s infamous volatility remains a big concern for investors. “Even back then during the bubble, it went down 20% on five different occasions so with Bitcoin, volatility is the price you pay for performance,” he noted.
Miller added the volatility is expected to continue and Bitcoin will likely experience sharp price swings. The latest of these happened as early as the past weekend—Bitcoin fell over 10% over 48 hours in a move that ended up causing $5 billion in liquidations.
Meanwhile, the investor reaffirmed that Bitcoin was ‘digital gold’ and perhaps even a better version of the yellow metal. “Gold is about a $10 trillion asset category and bitcoin is $1 trillion, and it’s infinitely divisible or almost so,” he explained, adding:
“It’s easily transportable and can be sent anywhere in the world if you have a smart phone so it’s a much better version, as a store of value, than gold.”
It’s a narrative shared by tech leaders like MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who each picked up over $1 billion worth of the asset in the past year.
The fortunes have already seen double-digit percentage gains. But for now, they are experiencing one of Bitcoin’s famed sudden drawdowns.
