The oldest cryptocurrency critique won’t go away: Morning Brief

Yahoo Finance’s Myles Udland and Brian Sozzi discuss critiques on cryptocurrency as the crypto space continues to grow.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: But Myles, I know despite it being a bank earnings day, you are still pretty charged about this Coinbase IPO, so much so, you took a lot of the Coinbase and crypto haters a little bit to task in today's Morning Brief newsletter.

MYLES UDLAND: Well, look, in the brief, we're working off the latest Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey. And in there-- and they asked, of course, these respondents, 200 respondents in the latest survey, a series of questions, one of which was, is Bitcoin a bubble? And 74% of respondents said affirmatively that Bitcoin is a bubble. Now, I am sure that many of these respondents just look at the price of Bitcoin, which, right now, is trading north of 64,000 per coin. And they do the standard thing that we have all heard from analysts, hundreds of analysts over the last several years. There's no intrinsic value. What am I buying? Why would I pay $64,000 for one block within the specific Bitcoin blockchain?

But I think my view on this and why I kind of framed this as the oldest Bitcoin critique in the book is that calling Bitcoin a bubble is so often not just about what one thinks of the price of Bitcoin. It is sort of a commentary on the entire crypto space, and saying this entire thing,, this entire $2 trillion market now is just a fad, a phase, something that I, as an investor in equities or fixed income or currency, some other type of function within traditional financial services, is something that I do not need to worry about.

And indeed, for many folks, crypto is going to and will, for the indefinite future, sit outside the mandate. You do not need to have necessarily a crypto strategy. And as we saw on that chart, 10% of respondents actually just declined to answer. They said I don't know. I don't really have an opinion here. Of course, it's interesting that a mere 10% of respondents did not say that they had a view on whether Bitcoin was a bubble or not.

But again, to get back to the original point that I was trying to make in the piece this morning is, clearly with Coinbase coming public, with big public companies like Square, like PayPal, Visa, not to mention some of the reported moves that we're seeing within traditional financial services firms, like the names you mentioned at the top of the show, Sozz, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs setting up crypto desks, working on creating crypto custody for their wealth management clients, all this, to me, says that the crypto space, while it may not necessarily be something that you as an investor have to have an opinion on, have to know about, it is-- it's not going anywhere.

And I think the Coinbase IPO is a further affirmation that this is a new part of the market. And we can, and we will, and we're going to in just a second, talk about the valuation behind some of the companies here. We can have an argument about how you would go about valuing Bitcoin. But I think that, to me, the bubble critique is often just a way for someone to hand wave and say, I don't want to worry about crypto at all. And I just don't think that's really an option right now. I mean, you cannot worry about it, but to say, it's definitely overvalued and I'm right because I understand discounted cash flow models, I just think those days are well past us now.

BRIAN SOZZI: Well said.