Why Bitcoin Doesn't Trade Like Gold Yet | Haseeb Qureshi Explains Crypto's Future

There's so many people I know who came into crypto at the same time that I did and who didn't make money. How is that possible that you can enter the industry when Bitcoin and crypto and all this stuff is so low and still not make money? The answer is very simple: you just didn't do the obvious thing, which is stay in the market. Just stay in the market. As long as you stay in over a long enough time horizon, you will make money. It's basically guaranteed if you look through the history of crypto to where we are today. But people don't do it. In my time in this industry, there have been these dark moments, these dark nights of the soul. You have to look inside and ask yourself, why do I actually believe this? Because everything is moving against me. The entire universe is conspiring to say, 'Haseeb, you're an idiot. Get the hell out of these assets. This was a mistake.' And you have to believe that something much bigger, much longer term is happening, of which this is one temporary snapshot.

Something well above 100k, probably south of a million. I don't know what that number is. Many other people have spent a lot more time thinking about that than I have. In terms of what saturation looks like, saturation looks like basically Bitcoin is very boring. That's what it looks like. It looks like young people don't talk about Bitcoin anymore. It's something their parents do. That's how you'll know it's saturated. When you are kind of cringe for telling your kids about Bitcoin and they don't even know about it because it's just a thing that old institutional people do. That is when you're like, 'Okay, wow.' And we've now crossed the chasm to the point where Bitcoin no longer feels countercultural. It no longer feels like taking a risky bet. It actually feels like the thing you're supposed to do. It's what Morgan Stanley's telling you to do. It's what Vanguard's telling you to do. It's what every responsible financial voice in society is telling you to do. That, I think, is also when you'll start to see Bitcoin behave like gold. Or maybe I should say rather how gold used to behave. If, in fact, Bitcoin is able to usurp a lot of the market share that gold once had. But before then, why would Bitcoin behave like gold? It doesn't make any sense. Bitcoin is obviously not like gold. Bitcoin is a bet on something that may in the future become like gold. But something that may in the future become like gold is still going to be very volatile on the basis of how long is it going to take for this thing to become gold. If it takes 10 years, then you apply a discount rate based on the future value that it's going to be and based on interest rates. Interest rates right now are relatively high. That gives you a certain fair market value for what this thing is. If instead you realize, 'Oh no, this is going to take longer than I thought, it's going to take 15 years,' that is going to cause you to mark down very aggressively the same asset, even if the terminal price is the same. That's just how discounting works. That's just how net present value works. So all that is to say, you do not have to believe, or I should say, even if you believe that this thing is going to be like gold someday, that doesn't mean it's going to trade like gold in any way right now. Why would it? It shouldn't. It's a fallacy to look at Bitcoin and say, 'Well, you say it's going to be digital gold, why isn't it trading like gold?' Crypto is literally a technology. Bitcoin is software that people run on their computers. Everything that we've built in this space is software. So it doesn't necessarily behave like software companies do. There's obviously a difference between something like a Microsoft and Bitcoin or Ethereum or Aave. But at the end of the day, I think there's an enormous amount of lessons that we can learn in the technology industry that are directly applicable to crypto. Things about learning what makes for effective teams, how technologies get adopted, what the growth curves, retention curves need to look like in order for stuff to be sustainable. That all comes directly from the tech industry. At the same time, crypto is not just tech. Crypto is also about money. It's also about society. It's also about governments. There's an enormous amount that one needs to learn from these other domains as well in order to really have a complete picture of crypto. So it's not just about tech. We've seen the dot com bubble and dot com crash. The dot com bubble and dot com crash was about inflated expectations, but it was also about finance. It was also about money and capital flows. And of course, we can see very clearly crypto is very deeply about money and capital. And if you don't understand the financial element, you're not going to see the whole elephant. So I think the answer is that yes, tech is extremely informative, and not everybody in crypto has that perspective, especially if you're a trader, especially if you're a pure financial markets player, you're not necessarily going to have that vantage point.

You know, Bitcoin went from 19k down to 4,000, and Ethereum just pancaked below 100 bucks. And there was this very strong sense at the time that maybe we all fooled ourselves, that this was all a collective delusion. And the question is, what would have gotten you to make the right decision in 2018? The right decision was stay in the market, hold on to these assets, and bet on things you believe in for the long run. And there was a good period of 2018 to 2020, until COVID, that nothing was happening. There was no price action, there was no recovery, there was no 'oh, everything's going to be okay.' It was just darkness. Now, in that darkness, there was a little bit of light. And you could see DeFi was just starting to, you know, MakerDAO was getting, Compound was starting to form. You could see things were happening, but they were all small, they were all tiny, everything was subscale. It was all just kind of weirdos in their proverbial garages making little knick-knacks to show each other. But crypto was a place where you had to believe. You had to have a long-term belief that there was something much bigger that was coming than what you could see then. That required you to believe in the exponential, to believe that this technology was going to affect more than just 100,000 people, which is maybe who was using the blockchain at that time. Now, in retrospect, you look back at that and you're like, 'Oh, it should have been obvious.' It wasn't obvious. None of this stuff was obvious at the time. And if you go then to 2022 after FTX collapse, same thing. What would have caused you to step in and to buy these assets after this enormous wipeout that we saw from the FTX collapse, Bitcoin going all the way down below 20K again. And the answer is again the same thing: you had to have believed in the exponential, that all this stuff is going to become much bigger. At that time, it was unthinkable to tell somebody that I think the US government is going to be buying Bitcoin. You say that after Sam drove the entire industry into the ground. At the time we were literally wondering, is the US going to ban crypto because of how egregious this collapse is? When you are as connected and powerful as SBF was, and you turn out to be a generational charlatan, there's going to be hell to pay. And we didn't know what was going to happen. And so from that, what is going to get you to believe in this stuff, and to do the right thing, was to just stay in the market. Just hold on to these assets and keep going. Again and again and again in my time in this industry, there have been these dark moments, these dark nights of the soul. You have to look inside and ask yourself, why do I actually believe this? Because everything is moving against me. The entire universe is conspiring to say, 'Haseeb, you're an idiot. Get the hell out of these assets. This was a mistake.' And you have to believe that something much bigger, much longer term is happening, of which this is one temporary snapshot. I think that it is correct, first and foremost, for AI to be gobbling up a lot of talent. AI is unequivocally the most important technology of the 21st century. Zero doubt in my mind about that. And if you cannot really identify the value you're bringing to crypto, then maybe it's time for you to go. I think that's healthy and normal. It's a reallocation of capital and a reallocation of talent. That's part of what capitalism is for: allowing the market to tell you, 'Hey, your services are no longer needed here, but over here they might be really valuable.' The pioneers in the crypto industry, that's what when we talk about OGs leaving, that's what we mean. The pioneers are the crazy people. They're the people who are attracted to the wild west. Most people are not pioneers. Most people are not attracted to the wild west. Most people are terrified of the wild west. Most people are scared of getting bit by a rattlesnake and getting marauded by Native Americans and dying somewhere in the forest. And that does happen to people.