In January of this year, $ 1,000 was the milestone that bitcoin owners were eager to reach. The digital currency hit that, overcame it and increased tenfold to over $ 10,000. This year has been filled with good news for digital currency, from another Asian market boom, to the integration of Bitcoin with the Square App, the launch of regulated futures and l & # 39; 39, growing adoption mainstream. Despite the fact that Bitcoin is starting to be a force to be reckoned with in the global economy, Bitcoin is just starting to become a force to be reckoned with.
Cointelegraph had the opportunity to meet with several experts. We shared their answers below.
Institutional Currency
Hedge funds, pension funds, family offices and others have shown extraordinary interest in Bitcoin this year. Such "institutions" control large amounts of money. For example, the British hedge fund Man Group, which has shown interest in Bitcoin trading, controls assets over $ 100 billion.
Simon Yu, CEO of StormX, said:
"The Bitcoin price is at its highest level because of the institutional money that is pouring into the cryptocurrency market Recently, announcements from the South Korean bank Hyosung in support of Bitcoin, CME group announcing the launch of a Bitcoin futures market and Square Cash advertising Bitcoin will be supported by a bullish behavior on the market, indicating a major change.
"The general public begins to realize that cryptocurrency is beginning to be adopted by traditional markets and will continue its uptrend then that they see the potential of a larger number of companies to adopt cryptocurrency. "
Christopher Gray, COO of Caplinked, agrees with the statements of Yu, but he is much less bullish:
"Investors unaccustomed to crypto stack money in Bitcoin right now, making the situation very unstable as investors expect Bitcoin's price to continue to grow. 39; increase. Any decline could be dramatically exaggerated because they are not stable owners of Crypto.
"Alternatively, the price could continue to rise parabolically, drawing huge sums of tens of billions of dollars from other risky liquid investments such as growth stocks and "junk bonds." This could lower the prices of these investments because of the liquidity of these investments and their crypto. "
" Whatever it is, this situation is not stable and can not continue for an extended period of time.It must be given something on one of the risky markets because liquidity in these markets is not infinite and nothing here is created, simply moved from a risky market by speculators.This did not matter when the total cryptographic value was low, but at those levels of several hundred billion, she becomes an important user of pital-global risk. "
Newcomers are still early adopters
In 2014, when Bitcoin hit its first real swing with Coinbase and other exchanges improving their user experience, people were already asking, "Is it too late to get into Bitcoin?"
These questions persist today, and occur every time the price of Bitcoin increases by $ 1,000. However, since only half a percent of the world's population uses digital currency, there is still plenty of time to adopt it.
Jon Chou, CEO of Bee Token, says:
"People often complain that it's too late to get into Bitcoin, that most early adopters have been there since 2010 and that there is no more or less room for upside.I will offer an alternative long-term angle; this is not a financial advice.According to Blockchain. info, there are about 700,000 Bitcoin addresses in November 2017.
"One of the main problems that Bitcoin claims to solve is the issue of remittances, basically an access globally distributed … Well, there are seven billion people in this world. Assuming a penetration rate of 10% and if everyone has a single address, there are still 700 million addresses potentially in the future. This is a 1000x potential in the user base. Regardless of short-term price fluctuations, it is important to realize how far we are in the entire Blockchain.
Sol Lederer, Blockchain Director at LOOMIA echoes Chou. is still in its infancy, and that 2010 Bitcoiners and earlier are now starting to be justified rather than victimized.
"The long-time Bitcoiners finally feel justified that their currency has been ridiculed for years, is finally taken seriously.Naysayers can still say that Bitcoin is a bubble, but very few would say that it's worthless or a scam, but only a year ago it was a common narrative.
"The future of Bitcoin is still uncertain he faces the same serious technical challenges that he has for years, and faces fierce competition from newer and more sophisticated blockchains.But even though he had to crush, he is It's obvious that Bitcoin is here to stay, that it is trading at $ 10,000, $ 5,000 or $ 500, that will not go away. "