Bitcoin has recently made it through a chain split unscathed, due to the impending lock-in of SegWit, a somewhat controversial solution to Bitcoin’s scalability issues.
Shortly after the split on August 1st, which brought us Bitcoin Cash, in addition to Bitcoin, miners continued to signal for the activation of SegWit, an alternative scaling solution to increasing blocksize.
SegWit has been locked in ad the price of Bitcoin has shot up dramatically, reaching an all time high of over $4,400, a 100% increase in price in just under a month. This means that if Bitcoin was to follow Litecoin’s example, doubling in price just 5 days after the activation of SegWit, the price could be expected to double again shortly following the activation of SegWit on the Bitcoin network.
Masterluc’s Prediction
Although Bitcoin has reached new highs recently, the road to $8,000+/BTC is not without its bumps. Keeping in tradition with Bitcoin’s historic volatility, the price of Bitcoin dropped below $4,100 within the same day as reaching its all time high on August 15th, and is now back at $4381 at the time of writing. Although this is a huge drop in price, almost 10%, it’s nothing to be worried about, due to the quick rebound.
This volatility is not worrying to one Bitcoin trader in particular who is seen as a legend amongst those who have been into Bitcoin for years.
€˜Masterluc’, the same person who correctly predicted that Bitcoin would fall into a multi year bear run after reaching an all time high of $1100 in December of 2013, now predicts that Bitcoin will reach a price of $15,000 this year, and will rise to somewhere between $40,000 -$110,000 before the end of this bull-run, which he expects to end in 2019. Although these predictions from masterluc have absurd numbers in them, it seems as if he may be onto something.
Apart from Bitcoin possibly to doubling in price in the months following SegWit activation, Bitcoin would continue to rise if it retains its momentum. Moreover, according to his graphs Masterluc sees no resistance until Bitcoin reaches $15,000, and if those graphs stay true there shouldn’t be. Although this is just one prediction from one Bitcoin trader, he was able to correctly predict the bear run of bitcoin after it first reached $1100, so there should be some weight to what he says.
However, in order for Masterluc’s prediction to come true, there would have to be some significant catalyst in the market to cause bitcoin to go up more than 20x.
Money on the sideline
As of today, despite the market cap of nearly $69 billion there is much less than a tenth of a percentage percentage of the world’s capital in Bitcoin. According to Ian Lee, who led the blockchain division at Citi, the world has more than $7 trillion invested in gold, which dwarfs cryptos in comparison.
If there is to be a massive shift in price, there would have to be a significant shift in the amount of the world’s capital used in Bitcoin. In other words, if Bitcoin continues to become more mainstream, there will be more and more demand, which will drive the price up, possibly to the numbers predicted by Masterluc.