Tim Draper stands by his $250,000 price tag for bitcoin in mid-2023

Acknowledging that this year has already passed, Tim Draper said he was extending his timeline by 6 months until June of next year.

“I extended my prediction by six months. 250k is still my number“, Tim Draper told CNBC.

Tim Draper is one of the few mainstream investors to have taken a deep liking to bitcoin over the past decade. His first big dive into the digital currency came when he won the auction of 29,656 units of BTC confiscated by the U.S. government on the dark web marketplace Silk Road in 2014.

At the time, Tim Draper paid $18.7 million for these coins and predicted that within three years, the price of these coins would exceed $10,000. That prediction came true as the price of the asset jumped to $20,000 in December 2017.

Since that initial surge, bitcoin has experienced immense volatility, positively compounded by growth to a new all-time high (ATH) above $68,000 in November 2021. The coin has fallen more than 60% this year, highlighting the macroeconomic turbulence and ecosystem headwinds that major players in the industry have faced.

From the collapse of Terraform Labs and its associated LUNA and UST coins to the bankruptcy of Three Arrows Capital and, finally, the bankruptcy of FTX , any hopes of bullish price growth this year have been remarkably dampened.

Tim Draper justifies his bitcoin price prediction

For Tim Draper, bitcoin has many fundamentals capable of fueling its growth over time. He noted that the dam is about to break in terms of the demographics adopting digital currencies. He believes that when more women start investing in the asset as much as men, the game will change dramatically.

“My hypothesis is that since women control 80% of retail spending and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women, the dam is about to break“, he stated.

Tim Draper also noted that BTC’s decentralized business model is also a very unique reason why many investors will be willing to back the digital currency in the near future.

“The management of fiat money is centralized and erratic. When a politician decides to spend $10 trillion, your dollars are worth only 82 cents. Then the Fed has to raise rates to compensate for the spending, and these arbitrary centralized decisions create an incoherent economy“, he added, pointing out that this is not how bitcoin or cryptocurrencies work in general.