Hedge fund manager Roy Niederhoffer is selling his 10,720-square-foot townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for $15.9 million — and he’s willing to accept cash or bitcoin as payment.
“I’m a big believer in bitcoin,” Niederhoffer told Bloomberg. “I really am so bullish on it, and I want to own more of it.”
Niederhoffer is the president of R.G. Niederhoffer Capital Management Inc. in New York. He said if a buyer wants to pay for his townhouse in cryptocurrency, he would pay the closing costs in cash and keep the bitcoin as an investment.
“Whatever the obligations and brokers fees are, I would pay in cash and keep the bitcoin,” Niederhoffer explained.
Despite the slump roiling the cryptocurrency market right now, bitcoin evangelists remain undeterred in their exuberant outlook for the budding industry.
Bitcoin Payment For Real Estate Isn’t New
Surprisingly, Niederhoffer isn’t the only real-estate seller who’s willing to accept bitcoin payments for their homes.
As the Inquisitr previously reported, Manhattan hedge fund millionaire Claudio Guazzoni de Zanett recently put his lavish Upper East Side townhouse on the market for $30 million cash or $45 million in cryptocurrency.
While selling a multi-million-dollar mansion in bitcoin might sound odd, the crypto real-estate trend has slowly started to gain traction.
In 2017, a Texas resident purchased a home using only bitcoin for payment. It was the first real estate deal ever conducted using only cryptocurrency.
The buyer’s broker, Sheryl Lowe of Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, said the bitcoin transaction was surprisingly easy.
“In all of my 33 years of closing transactions, I honestly couldn’t have expected something so unique to go so smoothly,” Lowe said in a press release. “In a matter of 10 minutes, the bitcoin was changed to U.S. dollars and the deal was done!”
Billionaire Tim Draper: Chill Out, Bitcoin Is The Future
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies got battered this summer, but crypto enthusiasts like tech billionaire Tim Draper and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said they believe crypto is here to stay.
Draper predicts that cryptocurrencies’ market capitalization will soar to $80 trillion by 2023, as the Inquisitr has reported.
Tim Draper Predicts #Bitcoin will reach $250,000 by 2022. He says the #Cryptocurrency Market Cap Will Eventually Top $80 Trillion ????
That is 400x where we are now???? https://t.co/FXS3iqfZ3Q
— CryptoCurrency News (@CryptoBoomNews) September 16, 2018
Draper said despite short-term setbacks, cryptocurrencies and blockchain — the technology underpinning bitcoin — will revolutionize the way people do business and will transform the world.
“The Internet started in the same way,” Tim Draper said. “It came in big waves and then it kind of came crashing down. And then the next wave comes concentrated but much bigger. I suspect the same thing will go on here [with bitcoin].”