Fortress Investment Group CIO Michael Novogratz spoke out for Bitcoin on Bloomberg, part of a solid wave of support for investment to surface this week.

Novogratz said in the interview how he currently holds personal as well as some company funds in Bitcoin, and has as Business Insider remarks, “a very simple argument for why he's bullish on Bitcoin.”

“There are in best estimates somewhere 30,000 individual programmers working on Bitcoin,” he explains, “I’ve never seen a small project with so much human capital going into it, so I kind of want to bet just on that alone.”

Bitcoin’s “democratization of finance”

When asked about the speculative nature of the currency, and whether payments scene will change at the price of Bitcoin’s failure, he defended its strong initial foothold but stopped short of long-term hypotheses. “I think it’s got first mover advantage but certainly there are risks,” he continued, adding that the system is on the path to a payment revolution and even “democratization of finance” which would feature such setups as peer-to-peer lending.

Novogratz also touched on a familiar, yet no less valid point. “The banks’ […] biggest threat is that which has been happening to so many other industries now happening to the finance industry; the Internet disintermediates the big players,” he said, concluding that banks in future “are going to look more and more like utilities”.

This last word is a loaded one indeed. Crises or no crises, the idea of banks losing their teeth and becoming in any way passive entities seems more or less like the stuff of fantasy.

As a cautionary tale, however, the investment advice given at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 event points to centralization as a catalyst to failure.

Peter Smith, COO of Blockchain.info, “pointed out when investors sent bitcoins to Mt.Gox, they moved into a master account and that was the how ‘not to’ have a Bitcoin account,” examiner.com reports, “The investors relied upon the centralized trust and management responsibilities of CEO Mark Karpeles.”

For all the positive sentiment, however, high-profile Bitcoin investment is remaining modest, as no one is as yet prepared to invest a significant amount of their portfolio in digital currency. What will be interesting in the near future will nevertheless be the support garnered by Bitcoin in particular, as more names come out in support of non-fiat.

If you’ve got bitcoins and are unsure what to do with them, check out Cointelegraph’s investment advice for some ideas on where to go next.