Bitcoin will reach $250,000 by end of 2022 or early 2023: CAL 3 Chairman Tim Draper

Venture capitalist and CAL 3 Chairman Tim Draper speaks during a press conference after announcing he has collected more than 600,000 signatures to put the plan to partition California into three states into the November ballot in San Mateo, California. (PC-REUTERS/ Stephen Lam)

Despite the cryptocurrency Bitcoin's wild swings in value and the turmoil, billionaire venture capitalist and bitcoin investor Tim Draper is confident about his prediction that bitcoin will reach $250,000 by the end of 2022 or early 2023, reports CNBC.

“I think I’m going to be right on this one,” CNBC quotes Draper as saying. Earlier in 2018, the CAL 3 chairman first made the bold price prediction when bitcoin was trading around $8,000, according to Coinbase.

“I’m either going to be really right or really wrong (but) I’m pretty sure that it’s going in that direction,” Draper added. The bitcoin investor believes the currency is going to be 'much more in use by then'.

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"Give it about a year and a half and retailers will all be on Opennode (a bitcoin payment processor), so everybody will accept bitcoin,” Draper predicted.

By virtue of its code, only 21 million bitcoin can be 'mined', out of which over 18 million bitcoin are already in circulation. A few major companies like Microsoft, PayPal, Overstock, Whole Foods, Starbucks and Home Depot accept bitcoin directly or indirectly through a third-party digital wallet app.

Among major predictions, Draper compared bitcoin to be similar to Microsoft in the software world or Amazon in the e-commerce world. According to him, bitcoin will be the centre of all financial activity for the next two to three decades.

However, the cryptocurrency's volatile value and concerns over its enormous energy usage have created anxiety among the traders.

Replying on Tesla founder Elon Musk's tweets and its impact on crypto world, Draper last week referred Musk as one of the most brilliant men in the world, but added that 'he got this one wrong'.

Draper purchased nearly 30,000 bitcoins in 2014, which was seized by the US Marshals Services from the now-defunct online black market Silk Road.

On Tuesday, Bitcoin was trading up by 0.63 percent at $40,194.13 in the 24-hour trading, according to cryptocurrency trading platform coindesk.com. With this, the market capitalisation reached $753.03 billion, at the time of filing this report.