Kevin Stankiewicz
\n@KEVIN_STANK<\/p>\n

Longtime value investor\u00a0Bill Miller\u00a0told CNBC on Tuesday he believes\u00a0bitcoin\u00a0is firmly entering into the mainstream, contending the cryptocurrency\u2019s rally in recent months is significantly different from its 2017 ascension and subsequent plunge.<\/p>\n

In an interview on\u00a0\u201cThe Exchange,\u201d\u00a0the founder and chief investment officer of\u00a0Miller Value Partners\u00a0said he believes bitcoin still has room to run to the upside. The world\u2019s largest cryptocurrency by market value traded around $55,800 on Tuesday afternoon. It\u2019s already rallied around 90% year to date,\u00a0according to Coindesk.
\n\u201cSupply [of bitcoin] is growing 2% a year and demand is growing faster. That\u2019s all you really need to know, and that means it\u2019s going higher,\u201d said Miller, who first started to buy bitcoin\u00a0around 2014 or 2015\u00a0at an average cost of $350 per coin.<\/p>\n

However, he acknowledged the historically volatile bitcoin will likely continue to experience sharp price swings, like the one that transpired\u00a0over the weekend, knocking the digital coin below $60,000. Last week, it reached an all-time high of almost $65,000.<\/p>\n

Miller said the rally in 2017 was, in fact, a bubble that ultimately burst. It\u2019s different now, he argued, saying, \u201cI don\u2019t think this is a bubble at all in bitcoin. I think this is now the beginning of a mainstreaming of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bitcoin saw its price soar in 2017, reaching what was then a record high of nearly $20,000 that December. It went on to fall sharply in the following months, losing about 80% of its value in what\u2019s become known as the\u00a0\u201ccrypto winter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEven back then during the bubble, it went down 20% on five different occasions so with bitcoin, volatility is the price you pay for performance,\u201d added Miller, who managed a fund that beat the\u00a0S&P 500\u00a0for 15 straight years while at Legg Mason.
\nBitcoin traded below $11,000 as recently as October, but its rally gained steam in the fall and carried over into 2021.<\/p>\n

Institutional adoption has been cited as one factor for bitcoin\u2019s rise, with companies such as\u00a0Tesla\u00a0buying the digital coin using cash on its balance sheet. A pair of major Wall Street\u00a0banks \u2014\u00a0Morgan Stanley\u00a0and\u00a0Goldman Sachs\u00a0\u2014 also are taking steps to\u00a0provide wealth management clients exposure\u00a0to bitcoin.<\/p>\n

Miller said he shares in the belief held by other crypto bulls that bitcoin is \u201cdigital gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scarcity is a fundamental characteristic of bitcoin, with its total supply capped at 21 million tokens. Currently, there are 18.69 million bitcoins in circulation, according to Coindesk. New bitcoins come into the market as a reward for so-called miners, who use high-powered computers to verify transactions across the decentralized network.<\/p>\n

\u201cGold is about a $10 trillion asset category and bitcoin is $1 trillion, and it\u2019s infinitely divisible or almost so,\u201d Miller said. \u201cIt\u2019s easily transportable and can be sent anywhere in the world if you have a smart phone so it\u2019s a much better version, as a store of value, than gold.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Stankiewicz @KEVIN_STANK Longtime value investor\u00a0Bill Miller\u00a0told CNBC on Tuesday he believes\u00a0bitcoin\u00a0is firmly entering into the mainstream, contending the cryptocurrency\u2019s rally in recent months is significantly different from its 2017 ascension and subsequent plunge. In an interview on\u00a0\u201cThe Exchange,\u201d\u00a0the founder and chief investment officer of\u00a0Miller Value Partners\u00a0said he believes bitcoin still has room to run …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19,2,7,8],"tags":[36,34,33,35,37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dblatantside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}