Bitcoin is about to celebrate its tenth birthday. Despite the bear market, commentators are optimistic about the future of Bitcoin BTC.
A bearish crypto year is slowly coming to an end. The almost ten-year-old Bitcoin is holding his ground bravely and seems to have slowly but surely outgrown puberty; at least he is much less fickle than at the beginning of the year. Also in the past week the BTC rate “moved” solidly between 6,400 US dollars and 6,500 US dollars.
Tom Lee, Wall Street analyst and co-founder of the market research company Fundstrat, believes that more is possible. Lee is known for his unshakable bullish attitude towards Bitcoin and finds that the current bearish mood among investors is not justified – and contradicts himself in the following sentence. So he said to the YouTube channel “Crypto Tips”:
“People are too bearish. They are bearish because it makes sense. They know that market conditions have been terrible and we [the Bitcoin rate] are below our 200-day average.”
So far, so contradictory. Lee refers here to an analysis of Fundstrat. This has shown that if the Bitcoin price is below its 200-day average, it will rise only 50 percent of the time in the next six months. However, if the price is above this average, the Fundstrat says the chances for growth are 80 percent. Lee nevertheless remains a bull. He currently sees the Bitcoin bottom at 6,000 US dollars – just as high as the current break-even point for mining one BTC. By the end of 2018, this should be between 8,000 and 9,000 US dollars, literally preparing the ground for Lee’s well-known 20,000 US dollar forecast.
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Strong as a bear despite the bear market
Joseph Lubin also paints an optimistic picture of the future of Bitcoin & Co. Although the development of the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies gives a different impression this year, the Ethereum co-founder sees the crypto market as “stronger than ever”. Lubin justifies this initially strange-looking assessment towards CNBC in this way:
“Digital currencies are not on the verge of collapse. We have seen many booms and failures in our ecosystem over the past nearly ten years, and our ecosystem has never been stronger than it is today. I measure this by the number of projects, the number of people who have been drawn into space, entrepreneurs, developers. Its scale is larger than before, and the basic structure is being built.”
Nigel Green, CEO of the financial consulting firm deVere, sees things similarly – and makes a bold forecast. The crypto market is expected to grow by 5,000 percent in the second decade after BTC (after Bitcoin). The Bitcoin dominance will decrease in the process,
“because with the mass introduction of cryptocurrencies, more and more digital assets are being brought onto the market – by organizations in the private and public sectors. This will intensify competition for Bitcoin and reduce its market share.”
Green sees a beginning shift away from fiat currencies, which will accelerate over the next ten years. The future of money is crypto, and the “central” players are beginning to understand this:
“A growing number of large institutional and private investors, as well as financial institutions and supervisory authorities, know that cryptocurrencies are the future of money.”
Green is certain that the crypto market will “not be recognized again” in 2028.
Bitcoin praise from Steve Wozniak
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak also paid tribute to Bitcoin and Blockchain technology last week. At the Crypto Invest Summit in Los Angeles, Wozniak drew a comparison with the early phase of PCs. Bitcoin showed what can be achieved with blockchain technology:
“Oh my God, no control, nowhere. And it actually works. People said in the first few days about small computers: ‘It’s not going to work. No big company would invest in it. My company Hewlett Packard rejected me five times.”
Wozniak is fascinated by the numerous possible applications of blockchain and (other) distributed ledger technologies. However, it will gradually become apparent which ideas can also be realized. The “creature of habit”, the human being, is another factor that will prolong mass adaptation:
“Every blockchain application […] I hear of [makes me think] ‘Woah, that’s so fascinating. Will it actually work?’ […] after all, it boils down to what works, and we have to knock over one bowling pin after another. And it can take a while for it to start because people can’t easily change their habits […]”.
VISA soon on Comedy Central?
For those who, despite these fundamentally positive forecasts, still feel the pressure of the bear market, a little joke from VISA in the end. In an interview with CNBC, VISA CEO Al Kelly describes cryptocurrencies as “no threat” to the company’s business model. To this end, their use as a means of payment must grow significantly. If this should happen, VISA would be prepared to orient itself in the direction of cryptocurrencies. Kelly, similar to MasterCard’s competitors, shows at best a poor understanding of the “Bitcoin principle”:
“We want to be right in the middle, […] of every payment stream in the world, regardless of how it happens or what currency is behind it. So if we have to go there, we will go there.”
A romantic utopia that Kelly is designing there. A global, decentralized P2P financial system – and VISA is the middleman no one needs anymore.