For the past few days, there has been some optimistic forecasting circulating regarding the long-term price trend of bitcoin.
However, it is important to specify that these are predictions made by bitcoiners, particularly by large investors who have a lot of BTC in their wallets.
Summary
Tim Draper’s prediction about the price of Bitcoin
One such optimistic prediction is that of billionaire Tim Draper.
Timothy Cook Draper is an American investor who is the founder of several companies that bear his name, including Draper Venture Network.
Throughout his career he has invested in many companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Baidu, Skype, Coinbase, Robinhood, Twitch, and many others.
However, he became famous through an investment in Bitcoin made in 2014.
At the time, the world’s largest existing crypto exchange, Mt. Gox, had failed and what would later prove to be the worst bear-market in Bitcoin’s entire history was underway.
Draper made that investment by purchasing some of the BTC seized from Silk Road in an auction. The purchase price was particularly low, and later soared from the $500 average price on crypto exchanges in 2014 to $20,000 in late 2017.
Specifically, the American investor managed to buy nearly 30,000 Bitcoin by investing about $19 million, or at an average price of about $630.
At the time he already made optimistic predictions about BTC’s price trend, saying that it would reach $10,000 in three years. Indeed in 2017 that figure was reached.
In 2019, however, he predicted that the price of BTC would reach $250,000 by the end of 2022, but that did not happen.
He recently stated that Bitcoin will surpass fiat currencies because it is better and safer than the banks and governments that control such currencies.
In addition, he confirmed his $250,000 prediction, but this time moving the timeline to 2025.
Indeed, according to Draper, it is Bitcoin’s technological superiority that will lead it toward mainstream adoption.
He believes BTC is a better alternative to traditional fiat currencies because of its decentralized and trustless system, based on hundreds of thousands of nodes verifying transactions.
This should lead Bitcoin to overcome the need for banks and governments to determine the value of money.
Moreover, he also believes that it is only a matter of time before merchants begin to recognize that they can save 2% fees by accepting payments in BTC, since such fees on Bitcoin are borne by the buyer and not the seller.
Michael Saylor’s prediction
Michael Saylor is the co-founder of MicroStrategy.
Over time he has become arguably the world’s biggest influencer on Bitcoin, so much so that the company he founded holds about 150,000 BTC, acquired with a total investment of as much as $4.5 billion.
He recently stated that he believes that if the price of BTC does not go to zero, then it could go to $1 million.
He had actually said the same thing last year as well, but what is new is that he also seems to have stated that Bitcoin’s new bullrun has already begun.
He is referring to the fact that not only has the price of BTC risen 77% since the beginning of the year, but more importantly since the mid-June retracement it has risen 20%.
While these are not actually clear signs of an impending mighty bullrun, it is nonetheless equally clear that the rise has been there, and it has been relatively rapid and substantial.
It is worth noting, however, that during the last major bullrun the price rose from about $10,000 to nearly $70,000, only to fall back to $15,000 during the following bear-market.
In other words, the current price of just under $30,000 is certainly much higher than the bear-market low, but still well below the highs.
However, if one compares it with the pre-bubble price of late 2020, or just over $10,000, perhaps it is indeed possible to describe the one in 2023 as a small bullrun, net of the 2021 bubble.
More forecasting of price performance of Bitcoin
In the medium to short term, several pessimistic forecasts are circulating.
It is worth mentioning that many are only slightly pessimistic, because they assume a return to the $27,000 around which the price of BTC fluctuated for several months between March and June.
Right now there are not many who see a collapse below $25,000, that is, the June low, and there are fewer and fewer who believe that the price of BTC could return even below $20,000.
While optimistic forecasting seem to prevail over the long term, pessimistic ones seem to prevail over the short term, although the further forward we go in time, the more difficult it is to make predictions.
In addition, there have been many very optimistic long-term predictions made about Bitcoin’s price over the years, and many of them have turned out to be wrong, such as the one that assumed it would reach $100,000 in 2021.