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November 19, 2017, 03:15:00 PM |
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I feel I will tell you my opinion about the current Bitcoin market.
Bitcoin has a solid base of believers that trust the system, are optimistics and hold during huge bear markets. It has helped bring stability to the network and bottoms to the market.
Also, Bitcoin is useful in a lot of cases. It's an alternative way of storing value, it's much more decentralized than the banking system, we can securite it away from the banking system and move it across the globe and the amount in circulation is not decided by a government entity.
That being said, we are not in 2014 and the price is relatively high at a 129 billions $ total valuation of BTC in circulation. Remember when it was in the 200s for a while ? It was a valuation of a few billions, it went up 35 fold.
The PR campaign has been good, smart people have build around Bitcoin and crypto, the system and the community have grow without any catastrophic events and it proved the technical robustness of Bitcoin.
The adoption increased but it is not even close to be where it should be to be widely adopted and have less price volatility so a valuation of 100 billions of $ or more is questionable, it's not much use as a currency either and it's a store of value only if you accept the very high volatility.
It's too thin of an analysis to just state that the volatility is not a problem because it will not be there when Bitcoin is widely adopted. While the volatility could decrease, it will likely still be high even at much higher rate of usage and at a higher valuation until the usage is a high percentage of the total amount of currency in use. Even at a 1000 or 5000 billions of $ of valuation, catastrophic events or a decrease in confidence will send the price coming down rapidly.
All the speculators are jumping in, hedge funds are buying, the optimism is extremely high and keeps getting higher as the price goes up. The correlation between btc google search and btc price is known as being 1. Most people are buying to make a profit and sell Bitcoin to get more fiat from another buyer.
The optimism is already included in the price so a correction seems likely short term because when the optimism goes down so will the price. Depending on how low it goes, how long it stays low and how high it rebounds, it will impact the optimism around Bitcoin then problems such as the relatively high transaction fees or BCH being an alternative will not be disregarded anymore.
The price is high because many persons have it and want the price to go up and many more have been added to the pool, the due diligence analysis that are done on the market and the current state of affairs are very low.
We hear people not buying gold because bitcoin has been going up while gold has been stable, it's indeed one of the reason a lot of people have choose bitcoin over gold but when gold price goes up, some bitcoin wealth should move to gold and the gold momentum will be great for gold.
How low can we go ? It could certainly go down close to 1000$ since mining will still remain profitable for some.
When the US and European economies will come crashing down, the FED will create a lot of $ to save the system, it may or may not succeed in saving the system and avoid the biggest violences but it will not save the Dollar as the world currency. When there is war and violence, the State diminishes liberties and jack up taxes and when they will have a chance they may create a Fedcoin invoking the war on drug and crime and the need for more stability and transparency. It will bad for privacy and individual liberties so other crypto will be useful, including Bitcoin, justifying a 2017 USD valuation in the tens of billions.
The idea that Bitcoin can be a store of value for high net worth individuals and that they will have Bitcoin in their allocation portfolio is more plausible than Bitcoin becoming a currency anytime soon, it could bring the price even much higher. It's less a problem to have your bitcoins lose 20% if it's 1% of a multi millions $ portfolio.
Anyway, all the value, time and effort that goes in bitcoins and crypto will create great returns in terms of developing the use of blockchain and using crypto such as the value brought to internet companies during the dotcom bubble were not all lost, some great companies emerged.
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