“To the moon”! This “slogan” was heard very often in the past months in the circles of retail investors (and not only), by enthusiastic fans of various cryptocurrencies.
Until… the crypto-winter came.
Values plummeted, fortunes evaporated, enthusiasm was lost. And now, analysts are left scratching their heads skeptically, trying to answer the agonizing question:
Will bitcoin’s value go sky high, or to the bottom of the sea?
The bitter truth is that as investors experience the ups and downs of the killer roller coaster on which cryptocurrency prices have been tethered, they hear analysts making contradictory predictions.
For at the same time, there are analyses that predict a plunge below $14,000, while others put the base cryptocurrency at over $500,000 and the capitalization of cryptocurrencies at (brace yourselves) $10 trillion!
Midsummer night’s dreams in the middle of… (crypto)winter?
“Heavy pain”…
At least in the short term, analysts see no light in the tunnel and no market exit from crypto-winter.
“There is more pain for investors in the short term as markets will need to find their way through this new outlook,” says CEO of cryptocurrency-focused hedge fund ARK36, Ando Paroyan. But this, is not the most pessimistic view.
Traders amid the strongest shocks currently being experienced are bracing for a “hammering” from the US Federal Reserve (Fed) that could trigger a collapse “worse than 2008”.
The price of bitcoin tried to surpass the psychological $20,000 mark which it quickly lost and analysts fear that if the Nasdaq retreats, it will drag the cryptocurrency to the… bottom.
Cryptocurrency specialist analyst Nicholas Merten says the tech index is poised for new dips, which he believes will lead Bitcoin to new bear market lows.
“If we include the fact that Bitcoin will maintain neutral with the Nasdaq, (…) with our analysis we see a percentage drop from where the cryptocurrency is and that will take us towards the $13,600 to $14,000 area.”
Giving the next few months to the first quarter of 2023 as the time range, Merten predicts, based on his statistical model, that the Nasdaq could decline another 28%, which would lead the market to about a 50% retreat from historical highs.
These percentages, now, can be extrapolated to the prices and performance of Bitcoin and, consequently, other cryptocurrencies.
…or endless joy?
However, there are not only those who predict heavy pain for investors. There are also those who believe that the key cryptocurrency will take new hits, remaining in a bear market in the short term. In the long term, however, they expect redemption after the pain, just as a rainbow is expected after the “storm”.
The president and co-founder of bitcoin acquisition vehicle, MicroStrategy, Michael Sailor, is more than optimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies in the long term. He predicts that the value of bitcoin will surpass that of gold within ten years.
In that case, in theory at least, the largest cryptocurrency will have a value of $500,000 and a capitalization of $10 trillion.
What about those who consider it a “pyramid”
Among those who try to predict whether bitcoin will go up or down in price, there are those who point out that it simply doesn’t… have a price.
Among the big enemies, if not skeptics, is JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who called Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies “decentralized scams – pyramid schemes”, adding himself to executives such as legendary investor Warren Buffett and his “wingman” Charlie Munger, or Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
“I’m a big skeptic of cryptocurrencies, which you call money, like Bitcoin,” Dimon said before the US Congress and continued: “These are decentralized pyramid-type scams and dangerous.”
