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Breyer kept saying that the technology is too big to be dismissed just because of a temporary bear market. He also warned that “we’re close to a nuclear winter right now with cryptocurrency.”
Breyer noted that the current market situation is not rare at all. Such periods occur in cycles, and the current cycle will finally come to an end.
While he also cautioned investors, stating that the “near future will be a slog for investors”, Breyer had plenty of advice to the rest of the directors and members of notable companies including Dell, Walmart, and Blackstone who were also in the conference.
The buoyancy of Breyer on such sagging market is not the first of its kind, previously he has strongly believed on the future of Facebook in 2005 and eventually its shares evidently rose up. Interestingly, he was the first institutional investor believing and investing in Facebook.
After the last Facebook crisis, Mark Zuckerberg remained in power at the company, but that a “radical change” was needed on how decisions are made at the social media company. Last month Breyer said:
“I would back and invest again and again in Mark Zuckerberg. I believe he should be the chairman and CEO but the company, to its own admission, has deeply mishandled the past 12 months.”
Breyer noted that there was a lot of interest in blockchain, the system which powers all cryptocurrencies, which means the future is probably bright for this potentially world-changing technology.
He said:
“So many of the very best computer scientists and deep learning PhD students and post-docs are working on blockchain because they have so much fundamental interest in what blockchain can mean. You don’t want to bet against the best and brightest in the world.”
Breyer, who has invested in Ethereum and VeChain, as well as crypto startup Circle, referred to the ongoing market situation as an inevitable part of a market process that takes place roughly once every decade. According to him, despite the turmoil associated with crypto assets, blockchain technology has achieved a critical mass of mainstream research and adoption, which makes a future crypto market rebound a near certainty at some point in the future.
With a lot of people being genuinely interested in raising money, they do not have the time to run a company process to promote a product or service. They are looking to make their investments work by being a part of a company. While the idea of the then moment seems rich, executing the ideal takes a lot of people, strategy, skill and working by every minute.
So, people are interested in putting money in technology as they feel that technology works smarter than people many times. And a technique once proved and coded to function in a certain way does not deviate in its functioning.
Just for reminder, last month, speaking about China and U.S. race on technology field Breyer said:
“In areas like health care or clean energy, cooperation would be much better between the two countries and their technologies than would be outright competition. What is interesting about the trade war … is I‘m seeing far less U.S. money moving into Chinese technology companies, and I‘m seeing some caution now on behalf of the very best Chinese investors on U.S. technology companies.”
He added:
“I do believe ten years from now, of the 20 largest market cap companies of the world, several of which are likely to be $2 trillion or more, 18 of the 20 will be Chinese and U.S. technology companies.”
When speaking about artificial intelligence he said:
“This is not the first time investors have sought fallout shelter. Cryptocurrency bubbles have popped before. “AI winters,” periodic slumps in artificial intelligence excitement, are well-documented phenomena.”
Bitcoin Miners Shut Off But Blockchain Technology Still on the Rise
We already wrote about consolidation going on among the bitcoin miners that perform the complex calculations to generate the digital currency after the plunge rendered many of them unprofitable.
Malachi Salcido, head of Wenatchee, Washington-based Salcido Enterprises, which claims to be one of the largest miners in North America with 22 megawatts of power deployed and 20 megawatts more being built said:
“We are entering in the phase when there’s a flushing out of the market. There will be relatively few operations that come out the other side.”
Last week Overstock founder Patrick Byrne also said he is going away from retail to concentrate completely on blockchain, even despite the recent collapse on the cryptocurrency market.
He said that he is shifting its focus to the blockchain business, as he’s confident the technology will revolutionize today’s world:
“The blockchain revolution has a greater potential than anything we’ve seen in history. It’s bigger than the Internet revolution, how it’s going to restructure society.”
