The last year has been one crazy ride for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Too many bubble theories and forks, from China ban to Jamie Dimon, Venezuelan/African crisis, IMF chief, Christine Lagarde warned cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could cause massive disruptions and might just give existing fiat currencies and monetary policy a run for their money and Bitcoin futures. It wouldn't be wrong to assume that 2018 will be about Bitcoin disruption, nothing to do about price predictions, but more about geopolitical and cryptoeconomical implications.
1. Bitcoin is going to be a topic of debate on the coming G20 summit, a meeting between the European Union and 19 of the wealthiest nations.
2. From technological perspective, Segwit adoption would increase as major wallets/exchanges would be upgrading to Segwit by the first quarter of 2018. This is necessary if Bitcoin needs to remain competitive. Secondly, lightening network, no ETA yet, but if it gets activated in 2018 then it would establish Bitcoin as a reliable medium of exchange and could lead to big developments in Bitcoin e-commerce.
3. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will be looking into cryptocurrency in this year, nothing specific about Bitcoin.
There are important counter-trends to this — encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands," Zuckerberg wrote in his 2018 mission statement, issued on Thursday. "But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services."
4. Bitcoin established itself as a safe haven/store of value in 2017 and it's not going to change in 2018 as it might get more traction as the political and economical crisis in hyperinflationary countries like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina worsen to the point where we may even see one of these countries adopting Bitcoin as its reserve currency, a possibility.
5. Last year ended on a high with Bitcoin futures and this year SEC might even approve a Bitcoin ETF.
6. We would possibly see a few governments coming up with their own centralized cryptos this year and also some nations officially recognizing Bitcoin, possibility of bans can't also be ignored.
