$5000 can be reached in the next bubble peak, the problem isn't "if" but "when" we will hit those high values.
Towards the end of 2013 and start of 2014, consensus on these forums was that we would be at 10k per coin by now.
The bulls were very wrong. And they won't admit it.
There's simply not enough public interest to drive prices up to 1k again. There's not enough buying going on. Volume is ridiculously low across all the exchanges.
The November bubble was fueled by Willybot. There's probably no Willy to manipulate the markets now,
so the best case scenario is that we'll see slow growth this year, peaking at 700-750 by January 1st 2015. But there'll be plenty of good buying opportunities below $500 by then.
Best case indeed. I'm still on the fence about the supposed "Willybot" and the role it played in the November 2013 rally, but it's clear now that bitcoin has little left to offer for potential speculators. Each year price would go up and it didn't take a tremendous amount of money to move the market, so it drew many casual investors in. Now, we seem to have hit a plateau in public interest because the only interesting things coming around the corner is an ETF... so just another way for people to buy it... but no good reason as to why people need it. With the luster of large yearly gains gone, interest will fade, price will drop (lucky if we see $700 again this year) and people will move on.