Technology investor Jason Calacanis has issued a stark forecast for bitcoin, predicting the cryptocurrency will test $57,000 within the next 12 months and never reclaim its record high. In a post on X on Tuesday, Calacanis urged investors to sell, arguing that artificial intelligence now presents a more compelling investment case than bitcoin’s store-of-value model.
Price Target and ETF Outflows
Calacanis’s $57,000 target represents a roughly 28% decline from the $79,600 to $80,000 range where bitcoin traded when he published his remarks. He pointed to continued selling pressure from U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds as a signal of declining institutional appetite.
“Outflows from ETFs are signal and will continue,” he wrote. “We will test the $57K low again in the next 12 months.”
Recent ETF activity has been mixed: approximately $774 million exited over two trading sessions late last week, followed by about $110 million returning on Monday.
AI as the Preferred Investment
Calacanis contends that bitcoin’s limited productive utility makes it less attractive than emerging technologies. “Why put your resources into a dead network that offers nothing beyond a store of value?” he asked. He argued that bitcoin has lost the viral enthusiasm that once drew investors, while AI has captured the technological imagination and capital previously directed toward cryptocurrency speculation.
“Just sell and shift from bitcoin to Super Intelligence because one provides little to no value, and the other provides unlimited upside for humanity,” he wrote. Calacanis also disclosed that he remains long Bittensor’s TAO token, reflecting a preference for AI-related projects over bitcoin’s monetary proposition.
Bitcoin Advocates Push Back
Several bitcoin supporters challenged Calacanis’s remarks. Strategy founder Michael Saylor responded on X: “AI creates abundance. Bitcoin enforces scarcity. One expands humanity’s ability to create value. The other lets us preserve and transfer it across time and space. Digital Intelligence and Digital Capital are complementary, Jason. The world needs both.”
Others questioned his track record. “Is this you too from 2018 when bitcoin was worth $5,500?” BTC proponent Dan Held replied. “If we had [listened] to you we would have missed out on a 14x return.”
Calacanis’s comments followed a similarly pessimistic assessment from fellow All-In podcast co-host Chamath Palihapitiya, who has argued that bitcoin will eventually become worthless as advances in AI could compromise its underlying software.
A History of Skepticism
Calacanis is not new to bitcoin pessimism. Despite disclosing that he acquired substantial bitcoin holdings at prices between $100 and $200, his skepticism stretches back nearly a decade. In 2018, he assigned a substantial probability of bitcoin collapsing to zero. By May 2019, he predicted it would eventually trade between zero and $500, arguing that superior technology would displace it.
Those predictions did not materialize. In late 2024, Calacanis acknowledged bitcoin’s resilience, describing it as too big to fail and reducing his estimated probability of complete failure to less than 5%. His latest declaration goes further: “Bitcoin will never break its all-time high again,” he concluded on Tuesday.
For an investor who once held bitcoin through years of skepticism, the question is whether his latest forecast marks another premature obituary or a genuine turning point in the cryptocurrency’s investment narrative. To many observers, he is seen as a different version of constant bitcoin critic Peter Schiff.
