Bitcoin Forum

The bitcoin price rose enormously in the last year. We had about 150% increase in the past 12 months.

What do you think caused that?

1. The Halving.
2. Nothing in particular. It is standard for BTC to gain value as a result of general adoption growing.
3. Future Bitcoin projects potential - mainly: Coin ETF, but at that time SegWit and LN were hyped as well.
4. Something else or combination of all factors presented above?

Do you think rising trend will continue in 2017?

Or we will hit the ceiling soon due to current bitcoin problems: unresolved scaling debate, fee war etc.

it is all of the above!
but you should know that a 100%-150% rise is not a new thing and it certainly was not only last year.

2011 price went from $0.3 to $3 (900%)
2012 price went from $3 to $14 (360%)
2013 price went from $14 to $1200 i'd like to think real price was $180-$200 (1300%)
the Mt Gox correction took some time but before that price was rising the same way.
2015 started from $200ish and ended at $450 (125%)
and 2016 from $450 to $1166 (160%)

p.s. the numbers may be a tiny bit off the mark, check price history for accuracy!

I think that the financial turmoil in many countries with central banks are huge factors. These events all cause more people to come to bitcoin as a gold 2.0 and store of value. Especially events like the Greek debt crisis, India getting rid of bills, or Venezuela going into recession. I always view bitcoin competition to be mainly focus on fiat currencies, with other cryptocurrencies  coming second. And I am definitely bullish in 2017. I've been waiting for a hyper inflation event for that last couple of years, http://www.usdebtclock.org/ and i still think something will happen before 2020. there are so many things that could go wrong with U.S. economy very soon. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to-fomc.html I do think that some of the goldbugs like Peter Schiff and Mike Maloney who think austrian economics is the world will be right in some of there predictions. So we will see what happens.

I think it is because of halving because i just notice the movement from last 2013 that the price is increase before or after block halving dont the exact block halving before but i think there is a big help by block halving..
Compare to the last year movement of the price i feel and seen theres many changes right now..

Fair market value of Bitcoin $2136.52
http://www.alfaquotes.com/

Halving, plus ETF, plus capital flight from China (though that part might be abating because of PBOC actions).

the only reason for price rise is always adoption and nothing else. and more adoption leads to more demand and that simply rises the price based on supply and demand relationship.

all the rest of the factors such as capital flight!, ETF, and other weird things you hear in other topics, if they lead to more adoption that means they are contributing to rise by adding more people.

although halving means is the only thing that is contributing to less new supply so less sell pressure by miners hence price rise.

First and most important point is Demand, as supply of coins are limited and people taking more interest in it so, price will increase.

Halving is another factor as mining coins become less profitable when halving takes place, so it put pressure on miners, if price will not increase after halving then people will stop taking interest in mining coins as difficulty increasing day by day and thus we need high power miners which are very expensive to operate.

it is all about adoption AKA more demand.
right now more demand means more people investing in bitcoin since it is mostly an investment, and things such as ETF are effective but LN, Segwit,... are off less importance to investors.

for the future we need more adoption as a currency and the later things become of importance. and when more businesses and services are created in bitcoin world we see more people coming in and higher price. and the 100%-200% rises in a year continues.

Halving should be one reason, and the main reason, but before halving pump, I remember we could almost hit 800 usd, and then be dumped to 5-600 usd for months, and then big pump to 1200 usd.

if youre write about statistic bitcoin price is true
investment in bitcoin is profitable, because without anything do it can get much profit, and every year can incraese over 100%

Normally if you see the price keeps increasing itself as many new users are daily purchasing. And also the mining facilities are increasing so I think that also affects the price. Now talking about 150% I don't know when you purchased but most of the people had purchased bitcoin during the bitfinex hack as the price was really low so if you compare that time and now there is a easy return of 150-180%.

this is a normal amount of rise for bitcoin. and it is not even a new thing :)

all of these can be the cause of the rise.
1) halving has led to less reward for miners to dump which means less sell pressure.
2) this is always there, bitcoin is getting adopted everyday whether by new investors waning to join in the >100% profit each year. or it is adopted by new merchants wanting to get rid of relying on banks and get rid of charge back scam.
3) SegWit and LN are not projects it is more of development, projects are ETF, Megauploan 2.0, OpenBazaar, and many things that I can't recall right now. and these projects introduce bitcoin to many so they are helpful.
4) the price itself has always been a big factor. when bitcoin continues doing well over time, more people notice this and feel more confident to invest.


we are too far away from the "ceiling". many say price should be $5000-$10000 per bitcoin and we are so far away from mass adoption, so you should expect a continued rise in 2017.

I believe Halving could be one of the reason. Then another important factor could be the start recognize and acceptance of bitcoin in multiple market and industry

The rise started october 2015.Since then we are moving up.
The main reason I would say is that Bitcoin was highly undervalued!! And the smart investors knew that!Halving of course had an delayed effect as we saw in 2013.
There wassn't or isn't any hype due to SegWit or LN. As long as this isn't accepted by the network you can not come up with that as a reason why the price was rising the last 12-15 months!
The ETF gets way too much attention imo and I do no think it will get approved.Therefore we may see some correction happening, although I believe it will only be for a short period of time. A price of $1500 until the end of this year I would see as fair and possible.
However that doesn't mean it will happen. Things often come different than expected.

This year, the price will rise between 80-200%.

I remember last year that one of the reasons for the price surge was the result of the Brexit vote which sent the price from about $500 to almost $800, then it went back to the low $500s before stabilizing for a while at $600. Some predicted that the halving will have a huge effect on the price but that was not to be as that event came and gone and only did the price start to really ascend in November and reached four digits by the first week of January.

So many reason for this halving can be one of them, demand can be another, even can be talks about implementation of segwit and BU. All factor and some other are reason that price is changing and can be implemented in any way. Realistically we can expect this year for bitcoin to be over 1200 even 1500 in some point this year. Price can go down below 800 so best recommendation is to store as much is possible.

Current price and sentiment are partly being driven by the ETF that might get approved next month. It's a big deal if it turns out to get approved since this might be the thing that we needed to bring institutional investors on board. That's why I expect the positive upwards movement to continue till March 11, where after that we'll see what the outcome is. If the ETF gets approved, we may see a decent peak at that exact day, where after that we'll continue going up like we have in the last days. If it doesn't get approved, then I expect the price to dive below $1000 again.

Halving gave the start to the increase in price. This further moved gradually. Soon after this due to the China's fake market by exchanges the price pumped and in a short price again came down. Now due to the ETF the upward movement is taking place without any assurance.

Ill choose number 4 since all those 1-3 are possible causes on which bitcoins price does increase on that percentage and we cant still be sure if this trend will continue or not in the future but seeing on the current price it does still increase gradually which really means that bitcoin is really a good investment.

One of the reason could be the success of some Altcoin.A lot of people have investex in ICO last year like for example ICONOMI got 10k btc and all these btc are still in cold storage.Similarly there were other ICOs that got lot of btc investment like Antshares,Wings,Ark etc,this has led to short supply of btc and consequent price hike.

The reasons why Bitcoin is up 150% in the past 12 months?
I am also surprised: it should be 1500% and not 150% ...

If the block size is larger, the price could be higher.

I am not finding this as a valid reasons. With 1MB block size itself bitcoin managed to beat gold prices, what else proof we are still needing to put an end for those block size debates. I agree block size problem is leading to long waiting for network confirmations still we cannot ignore miner's concern on competition for finding the blocks. They are into a highly competitive market and their margins are highly oscillating thus we must consider equilibrium for their profitability and our network fees levels all the times.

Back to the topic, supporting factors which are keeping demand of bitcoin in higher levels would be the key for bitcoin's current rally. The Chinese investors and media promotions are few other significant factors beyond mentioned by OP.

the current situation with the block size and the additional spam attack that is going on, we have lots of problems and it actually is hurting bitcoin and slowing its adoption.
but if it was solved, the adoption that is needed for the price rise is not going to magically appear out of nowhere. it still takes time.
and as far as other speculators are concerned they don't care about the blocksize much. they just want to invest and make profit. so again block size won't change things for them either.

I would say just 2 major reasons.
1) Bitcoin was deeply undervalued
2) The hype about the ETF approval.

We should wait another week and then decide whether Bitcoin appreciation has been substantial or not.

dude OP is talking about the past 12 months, the hype of ETF approval is a recent crap that is flying around only these days (less than a month) and the 150% increase in one month is pathetically small rise for bitcoin. check the history sometime and see how big we were rising each year. there is actually a good reply in the second comment you can refer too and also you can check bitcoinwisdon or bitcoincharts to see the history of all the past 8 years.

All of the mentioned in the OP are the reasons why bitcoin has gone up in price about 150% in the past 12 months. The halving have really contributed to the price it had now. Also, future project potentials and general adoption growing was some of the reasons but for me there are addition to that. One of that is the Chinese manipulating price up then Chinese exchange freeze on China. That I think contributed a lot to keep the price to the levels we see now.

First reason was definitely halving. It pushed price.
All other reasons were speculative. Not much happened.

The Halving. Then the withdrawl of cash in India - there was a short surge in demand for bitcoin in India at that point (November 2016). Then the speculators piled in, and they are driving the rise, and seizing on any news to push BTC higher.

At some point though, speculators will take profits, they always do.

1) Bitcoin continues to be the safest and oldest coin, never been hacked or compromised
2) Bitcoin proved it can outgame governments (PBOC and other governments claiming how BTC is unsafe are now noneffective)
3) Price rises along with marketcap in a solid way
4) Cool updates coming in the future

1) ETF
2) YUAN
3) Europe, (Greece)
4) safe heaven
5) impressing price
6) hype

But halving happened significantly some what earlier when considering when bitcoin finds its rhythm of getting appreciated. I guess the new year boom and media coverage are the vital reasons for this rapid up surge.

I would say one big reason is the growth of bitcoin.
When you look at the altcoins, most of them have the same environment bitcoin has.
But they get pushed, just to fall again. Bitcoin did not fall.
I really think that the community has grown!
And that growth leads to a permanent demand for bitcoin, and to a high price without (much) drops.

the big altcoins are the ones having independent development. Examples are the Ethereum, Monero, Dash.

Halving never stop, btc getting acknowledge by more and more people daily, guess more people start to use and the price will go up i guess :)

I think everyone is starting to feel the benefits of the transaction with bitcoin, they get a lot of advantage rather than transactions with fiat money. And also the users of the bitcoin rise drastically.

All of that was a factor but I think we must also consider the political instability that happened last year and this year does not seem like is doing to do better, if there is political instability then economic instability is going to follow and when that happens bitcoin gains in value.

We're all perfectly aware that Bitcoin rose very high and by thousands of percent in the early days.  That is normal for something that's new and still finding its place and level of attention.

Obviously Bitcoin still is, but it's completely different now to the rises before because we're actually dealing with seriously significant amounts of money now and the price can't just fly up and down in an instant, even though it is reasonably volatile.

As for reasons for the increase, I don't think that there was a significant change from the halving.  Even though the new supply decreased, that should just be a decrease in the value of the mining industry and, while that may affect the price a little bit, it shouldn't be very significant.  Generally I just think it's Bitcoin's increase in interest and its continued media attention.  Maybe even its slight rise before was part of the reason for a continued price rise because of the media attention that it received and the fact that it hasn't died after the dumps from when there was the most hype about it around 2013.

In Bitcoin world, the cause of the occurrence price increase is due to the many demand than supplies.
We know that, every year the user of bitcoin is very increasing. And Yeah, now the price is go down again,
maybe it's because will be halving, but after halving usually the price Bitcoin will be up again.

The debate about what solution to take whether it is segwit or BU seems to have crashed the markets in the last 2 days and made bitcoin reach sub 1000 prices once again so I don’t see a correlation between the size of the blocks and price, but may be that is just me.

Mostly speculation but also because of the community growing together.

I mean let's face it, there is no way that something is going to rise 150% in a year because the user base growth has outpaced inflation by a factor of 1.5x. When there is good news, then there will be pumps. And there is bad news, there will be dumps.

Right now we are in a bear stage, which is unavoidable as well as unpredictable as the pumps.

But that sub-$1000 feeling again... Good time to go against the crowd and buy.

I do not think the bitcoin is in bear stage. It is consoidating. After a few months, the price will rise again.

Id vote for combination of the above. It is also worth noting, that we finally bottomed out about year ago from bear market that lasted three years (!), recovery was only overdue in that regard.

I believe rising trend will continue this and the next year with large bumps alond the road. We will see 3000 eventually atleast before bear market resumes in its full strength.

that three years (?) was the harm that MtGox did to bitcoin and the bubble took a long time to go away and price recover from that big manipulation and the scam they pulled in the end.
the "rising trend" however will continue as long as bitcoin is being adopted more. it has not ended and it will not end in 1 year.