Four years ago Kraken VP, Austin Alexander, was working with a group of tech-savvy youngsters in New York City when he had a ‘light-bulb moment’ which he says “convinced him to the core” that the Bitcoin price will soar much, much higher.
Alexander, who Co-Founded Wall Street’s Bitcoin Centre in 2013, revealed his moment of realisation while speaking to Australian crypto trader and educator Craig Cobb on the Trader Cobb Crypto Show.
“Four years ago now, I was working with some young kids in New York City… They needed to buy some kind of chips or something from China,” said Alexander.
“I was giving them some advice and looking at some plans and stuff and I said ok, you’re going to need to send this big wire over to China to pay for these goods and neither of these kids had a bank account.
“I explained to them what they’re going to need to do and they thought it was a joke, they couldn’t believe how contrived and difficult this process was when all they had known in their short financial experience… All they had known is Bitcoin and Bitcoin works, they trust it and it works and its normal to them.”
Generational change key to long-term Bitcoin price
Now working as a key executive at Kraken, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchanges, Alexander has a unique understanding of the way Bitcoin is being bought and sold across the globe.
“There’s a decrease in volume over Q4 2017, Q1 2018,” he told Craig Cobb.
“However if you were to expand your temporal horizons, then you would see that volumes compared to two years ago are multiple orders of magnitude.”
And its long term ‘temporal horizons’ in which he has an extremely bullish view on the Bitcoin price, based purely on generational change.
He believes there are many more Generation Z’s out there, like the New York City kids, who will naturally ‘normalise Bitcoin’.
“Everyday another grandpa CEO somewhere retires and some kid is graduating.
“I do not know where the price of Bitcoin is going to be in the near term but I am absolutely convinced to the core that the price of Bitcoin in the long term is going to be very very high.”
He says more Bitcoin price waves like we saw in 2017, will only help the cause.
“Each one of those waves you have more and more people, who at all levels, more people who are becoming introduced to the concept of Bitcoin for the first time.
“Bitcoin is very different, different than anything that has come before, it has overlaps with money, it has overlaps with commodities… The fact is that it’s a brand new file in people’s brains.
“Through the ups and the downs, mind share and the kind of global understanding that Bitcoin exists and the global understanding of the dynamics of Bitcoin, is what makes Bitcoin valuable, that mind share is just increasing and I think with that it’s just going to be normalised.