The real question is when? I make the case it could be 3 years away.
Regardless of your opinion of bitcoin, its price appreciation as an assist over the last 10 years is beyond anything that has ever existed. Traditionally dismissed as a Ponzi scheme waiting to pop, now debunked since 11 U.S. ETF’s have been approved by the SEC. Today, banking associations are looking to congress for legislation changes to allow banks to custody crypto. Once more banking institutions learn about bitcoin and begin to offer services; investment into bitcoin will become less “risky” now that their trusted bank offers it to them.
This will take time and will occur in waves as people learn the skills to implement bitcoin software into their current IT stack. Software companies will learn to and begin integrating bitcoin software into theirs. Employees will take their knowledge and start consulting companies helping others integrate it into their businesses.
That sounds farfetched if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening with bitcoin regarding Wall Street, government agency policies, electrical grid stability, and environmental use cases.
It’s important to remember that there are only 21M bitcoin that will ever exist. As a new money, it’s in its distribution phase, spreading itself into the custody of as many people as possible. This phase is very volatile, emotions about bitcoin, current events, and personal situations cause people to sell, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. People are also buying as they learn about it and begin investing, the trend of learning about bitcoin and becoming a user of the software or its outputs, participate in mining it or building a business around it will bring in more demand.
Investors in any asset will use a historical analysis to determine if its fit for investing. Depending on the asset, this includes bitcoin, the only thing that you have that’s concrete is its history. That history is one of a roller coaster on a loop, repeating its past thrice. But in 2024 that changed, it changed because we hit a new all-time high before the halving.
Many are ignoring this detail and predicting prices and future price drops from their own predicted highs; all based on the same time frames from the past repeating. That is, we will make a high of 500k by Summer 2025 with a bear market bottom by December 2026.
What I think is being missed is that in the past, we really only had retail investors, the cycles of the past were from that subset of the population. Now a new subset is going to join, and its size is too many % higher to legally write here. Also, they are not subject to the same types of emotional manipulation from headlines in the financial news outlets. Their learning and implementation of bitcoin will be based on actual timelines staggered across thousands of companies. A decade or more of learning is on the horizon for everyone.
It will be choppy to 1M, people will sell, but now there are more that are coming online to buy and they don’t need to sell like you as a retail investor would. Be mindful though, large scale losses of bitcoin will occur again as it has many times in the past by companies losing or swindling their customers like FTX did. These companies failed and their customers who owned bitcoin lost it, if they are returned anything after the bankruptcy, it will be pennies on the dollar and paid in dollars not bitcoin. There are no bailouts for bitcoin by any central bank or government. You as the investor, owner of bitcoin is ultimately responsible for its custody, this is why it will be choppy to 1M.
Once we get there, it will be choppy to 10M.
Today there are nearly 54M bitcoin addresses with bitcoin stored. If each address represents one person who actually owns bitcoin, that’s less than 0.01% of the world adult population. How can anyone think bitcoin will lose value, if every indication is that its uses will expand, and so little people have any bitcoin?
