A bestselling author more commonly known as the Barefoot Investor has issued a warning about a cryptocurrency bubble.
Barefoot Investor Scott Pape said that with 7,773 types of digital coin in existence, most of them would end up being worthless.
'Let me be clear: I am sure that a handful of these will be genuinely transformational - don't ask me which ones,' he said in a blog.
'And I'm also just as sure that the vast majority of these coins will end up being worth digital diddly squat.'
Bitcoin, the world's first digital currency, is now worth $81,500, a big drop from the $93,300 level of November 10.
But the price has tripled in a year from $26,000 despite a year of volatility that saw its value crash by a third in one week because of tweets from Tesla billionaire Elon Musk.
A bestselling author more commonly known as the Barefoot Investor has issued a warning about a cryptocurrency bubble. Scott Pape (pictured with his wife Liz) said that with 7,773 types of digital coin in existence, most of them would end up being worthless
Mr Pape, 43, said there was a risk of a cryptocurrency bubble, without specifically mentioning Bitcoin.
'Yet history also teaches us that in every gold rush there are scams, cons and bubbles just waiting to be popped,' he said.
'This time is no different. If anything it's worse — today a majority of Gen Z investors in the US think crypto will make them millionaires. It won't happen.'
However not everyone agrees with Pape, and Finder co-founder Fred Schebesta, who recently launched an app to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum, expects Bitcoin to continue soaring.
The 40-year-old entrepreneur, worth an estimated $340 million by The Australian Financial Review, regards non-fungible tokens and decentralised finance as the future.
But his November 10 forecast of Bitcoin reaching $100,000 'within days' didn't happen.
'There is too much momentum, there are so many people involved, it's too big now to stop. Bitcoin's "pumpamentals" are strong,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'With the pace of Bitcoin right now and the momentum for NFTs and Defi, I am expecting Bitcoin to reach $A100,000 within the next week.'
Earlier this month, Tony Richards, the head of the Reserve Bank of Australia's payments policy section, said a big plunge in cryptocurrencies was likely.
Bitcoin, the world's first digital currency, is now worth $81,500, a big drop from the $93,300 level of November 10. But the price has tripled in a year from $26,000 despite a year of volatility that saw its value crash by a third in one week because of tweets from Tesla billionaire Elon Musk
'There are plausible scenarios where a range of factors could come together to significantly challenge the current fervour for cryptocurrencies, so that the current speculative demand could begin to reverse, and much of the price increases of recent years could be unwound,' he told Australian Corporate Treasury Association.
