Indonesia In Billionaire Investor Tim Draper’s Crosshairs

Where might investment riches lie in Asia? One billionaire investor, Tim Draper, sees promise in Indonesia.

And the lure there may come in bits and bytes — as in bitcoin and blockchain. Bloomberg reported that the country’s lack of banking infrastructure paves the way for new, well, banking infrastructure. A dichotomy is at work here, with tech-savvy entrepreneurs and citizenship navigating platforms and apps and smartphones. But on the other end of the spectrum, Indonesia has among the world’s highest profiles of cash usage, second only to India, the newswire stated, quoting the World Bank. The opportunity is there, Tim Draper said, for the adoption of cryptocurrency and its technologies to become widespread in the region.

The billionaire’s own investments in startups have been notable with stakes in Tesla, Skype and Baidu.

The opportunity is such, said Bloomberg, that Draper’s attention has been shifting from China to Indonesia, and he also stated that moving money into China, via investments, has become less attractive as capital controls make investing “like putting money into a black hole.”

The investor told Bloomberg TV that in Indonesia “they don’t have very good banking services. So they have an opportunity to use bitcoin and make that as their currency.  Suddenly, we’ve got this major opportunity that’s not going to be around for those countries that already have strong infrastructure.”

Draper has defended bitcoin in the past, stating that the currency is worthy of investment with a long-term horizon. As reported earlier this month, the venture capitalist stated that the price of bitcoin could top $10,000 within a year.