Balaji Srinivasan ‘Burns’ $1 Million in Bitcoin to Prove a Point
Ex-Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan said today that he has now settled a high-profile Bitcoin bet made in March by donating $1.5 million of his own money. And he’s done it to prove a point, he says, that the US economy is in such bad shape that people will flock to cryptocurrency instead.
Srinivasan initially announced a $1 million bet in March, arguing that the global economy is on the edge of rapid change and as a result we will see the rapid adoption of Bitcoin – which he calls “hyperbitcoinization”.
The original bet was made with Twitter expert James Medlock and stipulated that if Bitcoin failed to reach $1 million within 90 days, he would receive $1 million in Circle’s USDC stablecoin.
Today, he said the bet was “closed by mutual agreement” and settled early, giving $500,000 to poverty charity Give Directly, $500,000 to Bitcoin core developers and $500,000 to Medlock.
“So I settled the bet in advance and donated even more than I had committed to,” he wrote today on Twitter. “I spent my own money sending a demonstrably costly signal that there is something wrong with the economy and that it is not going to be a soft landing like Powell [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell] promises – but something much worse.”
Although it can be seen as one finally admitted the effort, but he claimed that his reasoning for donating the money before the 90 days was up is that he “believes in the public good, but unfortunately we can no longer trust the public to tell us when something is wrong.”
Srinivasan insists that the US economy will enter hyperinflation and Bitcoin will be a safe haven – eventually reaching a market cap of $19.3 trillion. Bitcoin now has a market cap of $555 billion.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $28,827, according to CoinGecko, meaning it would have to increase in value by 3,369% to reach $1 million per coin.
The asset is currently valued 58% less than its November 2021 all-time high of $69,044. But in May 2013, it was priced at $123.10, meaning that over a decade, the native digital currency has appreciated by 23,317%.
Srinivasan went on to say that economic disaster was looming and that he made the donations to make the point that “things could relax very quickly.”
“A lot of things break at once,” he continued, referring to US debt ceilingthe banking crisis, bonds losing value and the war between Russia and Ukraine.
“I just burned a million to tell you they’re printing trillions.”
