Bitcoin Forum

Before the second peak bitcoin took the world by storm and suddenly everyone was talking about this new found gold/oil in form of digital crypto currency. The gold rush before that peak such powerful that investments from all over the world was pouring in from all walks of society globally. Unfortunately the correction happened after that peak was so brutal that many lost their hopes towards bitcoin forever. However those who were regular or familiar with the bitcoin world were aware of such volatility and somewhat prepared for it as well. Thus those veteran did not lose their hope. Bitcoin peaked somewhere around 17k USD to 20k USD and now it is somewhere around 3.5k USD - 5k USD.  Many investors have lost huge amount of money who were not considering potential loss due to uncertainty.

What is  your opinion and observations, about hurdles faced regarding raising funds, by someone who wants to establish business based on bitcoin?  How difficult it has became to convince investors to put their money in bitcoin or alt-crypto based project?

It doesn't seem to be reasonable to open a new business that would accept only crypto (unless you are opening an exchange and your service is connected to real world) and at the same time crypto wouldn't make a big part of your cash flow if you would accept it along with the other payment methods.
Most of those ICOs that gathered millions are obviously overpriced. From what I see now it is pretty hard to pick a project that would give you a good outcome. Even the ones that look attractive may soon lose their token price.

Volatility is certainly one of the greatest hurdles for investors and merchants that want to enter the cryptospace. Although volatility, is one of the greatest hurdles around for newbies and services alike, some do ride the wild ups and downs for profit, which I think wouldn't be disappearing any time sooner since bitcoin is still a great speculative asset and it proves time and time again. Legality of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies used to be one of those hurdles, though it waned over time due to a lot of positive feedback and approvals from governments.

It entirely depends on what business is being planned around crypto. If the business plan and the associated team is credible enough, it may not be very difficult to raise funds. Also I believe, if the business plan is solid, then it is easier to approach angle investors or venture capital companies than raising funds from the public. So it entire depends on the business plan and profitability!

I also pick volatility as the first that I consider as hurdles for somebody trying to invest in bitcoin and in fact, cryptocurrency as a whole. I have heard of people who just can't invest in bitcoin because to them, it is reliable and they can only estimate their financial stand with bitcoin because they can open their wallet and so many difference has occurred.  ;D

Project establishers, owners or someone that will open up an crypto based project that isn't really associated or fit with cryptos will really have to think outside the box how they can attract or convince investors to put money on them. The difficulty is high because they must put all details about how will crypto collaborates to their proposed projects or doesn't even make sense to associate crypto with their business. The difficulty got even more worst because of 2018 crypto market situation erasing views about easy money scheme that built up during 2017 bitcoin road to ATH run.

To deal on that, they really need to be aggressive and put up everything on the line at any cost. Risky after all because there is no assurance that they will achieved a positive output.

The reason for these volatilities is not Bitcoin as a currency but the behavior of those who use it, many use BTC to speculate more than it is a currency. "when was the last time that you pay using cryptos?"
If a lot of regulatory rules have been obtained and the manipulation of platforms has been prevented, it may limit the rigidity of these volatilities.

Until then, these obstacles can be solved by using platforms that accept cryptocurrency on one hand and pay fiat money on the other.

To convince investors that BTC is a tool for speculation, this is a false belief that must be combated.

up until today, most of the users have no confidence about the stability of bitcoin. but yes, it is slowly changing as more regulatory bodies are starting to accept its existence in the market. just to share an update -

https://www.coindesk.com/the-sec-just-released-its-crypto-token-guidance

so this is a good boost for crypto. they are slowly changing their stance in crypto. because no matter what, even without them, crypto keeps on surviving and fighting its way in the market.

It is not just the volatility of the price of bitcoin or crypto in general. There is also a bad reputation gathered over the years because of the rampant use of ICO, crypto, and bitcoin in Scam projects. At the height of popularity of ICO to finance crypto-based projects, there are lots of investors that we scammed by scam projects. Now, even if you have a legit project, investors are hesitant to finance or invest in it.

When we do try to look the current condition of ICO's nowadays then most of them surely fails off or not able to hit up atleast their minimum cap.
Investors confidence had been devastated on previous correction which in result into major loss and now reinvesting again to these project wont really be that easy once again
but i do expect that it will regain once again if the market tends to recover gradually just like on what we are seeing now.

Investors who got rekt during the bear market did that to themselves. It's pretty much rule nr1 that regardless of the project you invest in, heavily depends on the market sentiment. Even if your project has the best possible fundamentals, it will be turned into a pile of rubbish the moment Bitcoin drags down the entire ecosystem with it.

This isn't the stock market where you have a business generating revenue and profit streams. I'm really happy that I never invested in a project that aims to do x but doesn't deliver in the end. Buying spot greatly outperforms an investment in any type of crypto related business/project by orders of magnitude.

If you want to invest in projects anyway, then wait for the bull market and buy into a random token tied to the project and you're in the profits. Back in 2017 losing money was harder than making money. Everything mooned hard.

But the question is,We would able to experience such scenario again? Not on losing confidence with the entire crypto market but those situation is just like a dream.
We might see increase as of this moment but its still far to the situation happened wayback before but i do hardly agree on the point you have said that Buying spots
really outperforms any crypto-related investment as of this moment.

I don't think that we will be able to see that bull run again, yeah we might see that bitcoin price will reach $20,000 again but not with the bull run. In a slow and steady pace, bitcoin price will reach that height again.

I believe that the bitcoin price will reach $20,000 again although it will happen in a long time. But who knows, we will be able to see another bull run that might arise like what we saw in 2017, and I think we already have seen this from the market situation now. The market can suddenly increase in just a few hours, and we cannot believe that the bitcoin price finally breaks $5,000.

That means it's a good sign for market development, rising little by little, the important thing is that bitcoin can reach $ 20k, which is what investors hope.

I briefly worked for an ICO, so I saw the community of potential investors and how things are generally done. The problem with ICOs is that people who now about cryptocurrencies don't find them trustworthy, and those who don't are not getting the point of monetizing the projects with some digital money. Another common problem for crypto projects is struggles with choosing a payment system or opening a bank account for a crypto-related company. Institutions see the business where crypto is involves as something shady and not worth the risks.
Investors, of course, are not okay with how the prices dumped from $20k to $6k and then almost to $3k. These drops have shown how volatile and risky the market is, and caused many to say that it is all scam, a bubble that exploded, and that there's no potential in this area.

I had thought that the biggest obstacle for various bitcoin projects is price volatility that cannot be ascertained even though there have been many predictions, what factors can influence the volatility because until now I personally cannot confirm that. In addition, cryptocurrency must also clear its good name which is now considered a fraudulent project to enrich itself with several ICOs. We know that not all ICOs are fraudulent, but ICO is the image of cryptocurrency which is getting worse, even though at first ICO was created to improve the development of existing technology in cryptocurrency in order to attract attention from investors.

It is still a matter of audience that crypto reach and that i not the majority of the people that is familiar with crypto.
Its harder to convince investors to take the step. [ except for icos ; ) ]

The biggest hurdle might be you being unprepared on entering the crypto market. The biggest hurdle for any investor is the lack of knowledge when they first try to buy their first cryptocurrency because they think that cryptocurrencies is an easy way to earn money and all they need to do is to sit back and wait for it to grow. Now if the cryptocurrency is going down they don't have any kind of plan and of course their emotions will take over and do bad decisions for them. So for aspiring investors before you even try to buy your first crypto you must study first before entering the market.

I think that the major hurdle here is still in terms of trust.

The fact that you're funding someone internationally, who you may have never heard of before, while taking a huge counter party risk whenever you send funds through a irreversible payment method that cannot be recovered if the other party goes rogue means that people tend to be more cautious, and credit/investments thus becomes scarce.

This may be less of an issue nowadays with a lot of projects being more transparent with the team and all that, but that doesn't lessen the fact that there are still plenty of rogue projects that use fake team profiles etc. to raise funds. The fact that international legal recourse is difficult also sort of limits the sovereignty of what investors can do. But at the end of the day, the benefits of raising funds through BTC compared to traditional IPOs are obvious, and these hurdles I think are only a matter of time before they are overcome.

In addition to that there are other things which are influential to the market. Any single major player or group could change the direction of market at will. Recent upward surge in bitcoin and many alt-coin is proof. Thus some investor may find it  lucrative with highest possible risk.

government will eventually become the largest hurdle.

they will not tolerate seeing their fiat money destroyed.

I believe the major hurdle is the issue of security and volatility.
Volatility constitutes a turn off to potential Cryptocurrency/bitcoin investors.
Also the security issue whereby anyone can view ones transaction history on the blockchain is also a huge hurdle of bitcoin.

That is already a given fact, influential or what we can market manipulators, whales will also be in the picture no matter what. As you have said, some entity from behind trying to stir the market and pushed the price by $1000 in matter of minutes. That's how big those people are. But regarding your original question, I would agree that volatility and then trust could be one major obstacles. Volatility because you don't know if the project could be a success or if your money will give you good returns. And then there is the (pseudo)-anonymous nature of Bitcoin, are you willing to throw money on some project wherein the people behind are not transparent?

The hardest is breaking the barriers of usability. I mean most fiat currencies in the world has exchanges all over the world, you can go to any country and find a place to change your own national currency into their national currency and live there or spend money, bitcoin is still not that easy.

So, when it comes to not being able to exchange fiat to bitcoin easily the projects only rely on the people who had done it before and can do it anytime they want. That is a lesser amount than the people who use fiat which is basically everyone. That is why I think the adoption rate is so vital for the projects, if the adoption gets higher than the companies and projects will get higher as well, we need to focus on investing and improving projects that will help adoption rate among people who are not involved right now.

When it comes to security, I think cryptocurrency is a very secured one, it is just lack of proper security implementation by the users that made it pose threat to people, provided we can secure our wallet very well with a strong encryption, I don’t think the security of or fund should be an issue and the volatility we keep experiencing today is because of the adoption stage we are, once Bitcoin becomes very popular and if we stick to its use as currency other than investment, the market will fully be less volatile and be more useful, the time will come, we just have to be patient with it.

i agree, as long as we are not careless in opening a site that is not clear I think it will still be safe from hackers. besides that if we are still in doubt, can be divided into several wallets for our assets, or provide additional security

Knowledge is power, what I see here is because many people who first invested, lacked the proper understanding of how the system totally works and that is why they fell victim of such Loss, which I usually don’t see what many people called LOSS as Loss, provided the coin was not completely sold, the value is what dropped and not the coin, so I usually tell people that they lost the value and they have not lost their investment, which eventually the investment will come back to them, if they are patient enough to wait for it.

There is nothing we can do to persuade them further, especially for old investors, we can only talk to people that are yet to experience the adoption of cryptocurrency, wherein the percentage of those that are yet to adopt it is far more than those that has already adopted it. So, by the time those new ones adopt Bitcoin and learn from the past mistake, it will attract the old ones back to the system.