While there is a fair amount of skepticism surrounding cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, there has also been plenty of optimistic, and not necessarily misguided, enthusiasm.
Starbucks recently got Bitcoin enthusiasts excited by announcing that it would someday accept cryptocurrencies as payment, at least until they learned that Bitcoin cryptocurrency wasn’t on the global coffeeshop’s list. That indignity closely followed JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who in September of 2017 called Bitcoin “a fraud” before backtracking and admitting that the blockchain technology used by cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is a real thing, after all.
“The blockchain is real,” Dimon said. “I’m not interested that much.”
All this Bitcoin talk has had the bitcoin price varying wildly – as of this writing, each bitcoin is valued at $10,170.31, a number that is hundreds of dollars less than it was a few hours ago - but given the high numbers, some experts still see a need to suppress their excitement about the future of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin will dominate social in 2018
According to Jehan Chu, managing partner at Kinetic Capital, in an interview with Bloomberg News, cryptocurrency is poised to become “a social phenomenon” in the coming year.
By attracting more attention, especially through the dominance of going viral on social, Chu said Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are expected to grow the market while opening the door to similar currencies.
It is not as through cryptocurrency is something new. Now a decade old, it is already being traded everywhere, Chu said, but the social media interest will be different, because it will draw attention to cryptocurrency from audiences that are unexpected, which will like disrupt what has already a significant disruptor in the world of finance.
What’s Going on Right Now
Just before Christmas, the value of almost 90 percent of the existing cryptocurrencies began to crash, which likely had many tech-savvy people longing to withdraw their bitcoins while they still could break even, or maybe just catch some crumbs in the cyber equivalent of the bank runs during America’s Great Depression of 1929, caused by a volatile Wall Street that, like cryptocurrency, wasn’t regulated.
Days later, however, it had risen again, sometimes fluctuating as much as $5,000, and bitcoin owners who were sweating it out at their computers relaxed again. Because Bitcoins are scarce – there will be only 21 million of them available – they are able to command a reasonably stable price, although that last bitcoin, No. 21,000,000, will be priceless.
Too, the more useful bitcoins become, as more retailers begin to accept them as currency – we’re looking at you, Starbucks – they will be more useful, which will also make them more valuable.
What Will the Future of Bitcoin Look Like?
While there is no way to determine what will happen with cryptocurrency in the future, there are two basic camps – those who say that there is no real value to Bitcoin, so the price will remain volatile (“It could just as easily go to double as it could go to zero,” said Jim McCaughan of Principal Global Investors) or it could skyrocket, hitting numbers we haven’t yet imagined.
(In 2016, a bitcoin was worth a few hundred dollars, and one expert predicted that it might reach $1,000 by the year 2020, a number the cryptocurrency s has since far surpassed. But then, that expert probably wasn’t positioned to predict the market, given all the things at play, including the marketing value and appeal of social media.)
According to experts, bitcoin is rare because it is one of the only commodities that reaches such meteoric heights so quickly, leaping from $1,000 to $20,000 in a year, before settling in at a rate between $10,000 and $12,000.
According to experts, the blips in value are only a correction in the cryptocurrencies only happened to make Bitcoin’s value more stable in today’s market, which is generally necessary following a larger than normal spike in value.
“It’s not often that you can see an asset that’s in a bubble and a crash at the same time,” said Matt Leising of Bloomberg Business Week in a story suggesting Nostradamus foresaw the rise of bitcoin when he predicted that “a new source of gold and silver is discovered.”
In truth, Bitcoin is the hot currency on the block right now, and because of the attention, it is seen as more valuable. The supply and demand factor – the number of available Bitcoins continues to go down – will keep the value steadily rising.