The year 2017 has been an amazing one for bitcoin with price surges that went over the top taking it nearly to the $20,000 mark. While bitcoin had its ups, there were downs as well throughout the year; however, 2017 is over and its time for 2018.
The year 2017 didn’t start out promisingly for bitcoin and just as it was gaining momentum, China came out heavy handedly on multiple bitcoin exchanges while margin trading was banned. This caused bitcoin price to plummet. However, bitcoin managed to surpass this obstacle and managed to register gains and in the first half of the year, the price steadily rose to around $3000; but that was when the madness began.
Bitcoin price skyrocketed over the next few weeks and garnered all the attention it can from major news outlets. The price surge continued up until mid-December when prices topped $20,000 on several exchanges. Many people in the Bitcoin community thought that this price rise was unsustainable, and a correction was long overdue, and they were right. The price steadily dropped back down over the course of a couple of weeks and has stabilized at the $13000-15000 range.
So this brings us to the obvious question of what will happen to bitcoin in 2018? According to some predictions, bitcoin prices will fluctuate in 2018 as well. Below are the price ranges as predicted by some experts:
Tomas Salles, FXStreet Analyst – $8,073 to $89,750
Nick Colas, DataStreet Research Co-Founder – $6,500 to $22,000
Dennis Gartman, The Gartman Letter Editor – Below $5,000
Dr. Julian Hosp, TenX Co-Founder – $5,000 to $60,000
We believe 2018 will certainly be an exciting year for Bitcoin with more advances coming up for the technology including the Lightning Network. The project is expected to be completed sometime next year, which would enable instant and nearly free transactions. Schnorr Signatures are also on the horizon, which would restructure signatures in bitcoin transactions to reduce transaction size and thus, fees.
Bitcoin has had a great run in 2017 and while we don’t believe that the crypto will lose a lot of sheen in 2018, there is a strong indication that more and more investors and traders are also trying their hands out on altcoins including ethereum, bitcoin cash, dash, ripple, monero among others.
While there is all the possibility that bitcoin could reach the moon, the answer is ‘maybe’ considering that any number of things can go against the crypto including government regulations, security breaches, altcoin emergence, etc.