If you can believe Scott Minerd, CIO of New York-based investment firm Guggenheim Partners, Bitcoin is due to crash more than 70 per cent from current levels to US$8,000.

Minerd took a gaze into his murky crystal ball earlier this week, while speaking with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in a “Squawk Box” interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“When you break below 30,000 [dollars] consistently, 8,000 [dollars] is the ultimate bottom, so I think we have a lot more room to the downside, especially with the Fed being restrictive,” said Minerd.

He was referring to the US Federal Reserve’s hiking of interest rates and monetary-policy tightening.

Since falling below $30,000 earlier this month, Bitcoin has been in a fight to reclaim that psychological support level, instead finding it somewhere more around the US$29k mark for the moment.

The CIO also told Sorkin that Bitcoin and Ethereum will survive, although most others won’t: “Most of these currencies, they’re not currencies, they’re junk.”

Minerd then went on to compare the current state of the crypto market and industry to the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the dominant player in crypto yet,” he said, adding:

“If we were sitting here in the internet bubble, we would be talking about how Yahoo and America Online were the great winners,” he said. “Everything else, we couldn’t tell you if Amazon or Pets.com was going to be the winner.”

Minerd’s comments come after European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Sunday that she believes cryptocurrencies are “worth nothing.

 

Did Minerd’s $8k call signal the bottom… at about $27k?

Scott Minerd likes weighing in with a crypto forecast – usually at times of great market stress or euphoria. But the thing is, if you’d acted on his calls in the past, you’d either be in rekt city or probably would’ve given up on crypto a long time ago. Or both.

The guy has a solid track record of calling for higher prices at the top and lower prices at the bottom. As you can see in the tweet below, posted by Crypto Twitter account @mhonkasalo, Minerd’s past price predictions for Bitcoin are pretty horrendous.

And as YouTuber Lark Davis points out, Minerd made a BTC US$15k call at pretty much the 2021 bottom, which ended up being around US$28.5k.

This year’s bottom so far was just under US$27k, according to CoinGecko. A morsel for a passing thought, perhaps.

That’s not to say the Guggenheim CIO will be wrong again this time – a dip to US$8k would represent roughly an 88 per cent drop from Bitcoin’s all-time high of US$69k, reached in November. Bitcoin has been known to dip more than 80 per cent in past bear markets.

But if we’re going with historical precedents, the timing of Minerd’s inaccurate predictions might be worth paying some attention to.

If, for example, he’d not followed his own public calls on Bitcoin and pretty much invested the other direction at those times, then he might’ve done very, very well from it at this point. Not saying that’s what’s happened, of course.

Here’s another thing, though. As Lark also points out, Wall Street big shot JP Morgan posted data this week that shows 82% of those it surveyed believe we’re in a “crypto winter”, and that it’s “uninvestable for at least the next few quarters.

JP Morgan, along with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – these big cats probably just have everyone’s best interests at heart, right?