Hello Steemit friends,

i read everywhere we are stucking in a bear market and it seems so. This assumption is based on the fact that we had a exaggeration in Jan 18 with a market cap of over $800 billion. Now we are in a slump with over $300 billion market cap, which is about 37.5 % of that all time high. That feels very bad.. it feels always very bad if we can compare to ath which just happened recently. But no matter how painful that is we must remember what crazy bull run we had in 2017 until Jan 2018. If you look in the prior years 2016 and 2015 you'll not find anything comparable! But for market participants who missed the boat in 2017 it feels bad and there are many people who are still not in the crypto market today!

If you look at these numbers what do you believe will happen in 2018? Even more crazy upside?.. for me that's very unlikely. Because if there is any pattern, we should already be in a massive bull run, which is not happening. To simplify that look at the both trajectories of 2017 and 2018 for the first half of the year or 50% of proven data:

2017 was the year of a parabolic rise, 2018 is a year of a slump and i think what we'll see is a slight recovery over or below the ath levels of Jan 2018 til end of year but far far off the gains of 2017. We were in one of these bigger bubble like developments which hits the market every few years. If you look back there was one in 2013:

This one was similar in terms of gains we had in 2017 because if you look at market at the end of 2012, it was far under $1 billion dollar and these monster gains are not visible because of missing data from coinmarketcap.com! The ath of $15 billion market cap was only reached again in June 2017.. 3.5 years later, think of that! And after that we saw this huge bull run which ended in Jan 2018. If this is one of these bigger market cycles which is also described by Andreas Antonopoulos as necessary for step-by-step mass adoption then we see it now. He forecasted 3-4 bubble like developments before the 2017 exaggeration, which could mean we see 2-3 more until we reach true mass adoption (using cryptocurrencies like brushing teeths) and for Antonopoulos this is a time frame of 15-20 years! It's possible we'll see a long-lasting so called bear market til 2020 with ups and downs as always and far less volatility than in the early times of Bitcoin.

So, BUT market conditions have massively changed since 2013. We have not just a Mt. Gox exchange as center of the world for trading. Now we see uncount centralized and recently a growing number of decentralized exchanges. If you look at coinmarketcap.com you'll see currently 211 exchanges and 11,238 trading pairs and i assume there are far more with tiny volumes which coinmarketcap simply ignores today.

Volume of trading increased by a factor of 1000! from millions to double digit billions! since mid 2013 together with the overall market cap, which is now 20 times the ath of 2013 or in other words 1000 times higher compared to the low of 2013 and the high of Jan 2018. We have now not just Bitcoin and the Ethereum whitepaper like in the older days, we see now the development of tens and hundreds of protocols, infrastructures and dapps based for example on a maturing Ethereum platform. The market is far more mature than back in 2013. But reality hits always emotions of market participants, there is no short cut around that. Development takes time, much time, adoption, regulation attemps, scaling need time and the question is how far is the valuation of market participants off from reality.. below or above?

Is it presumptuous to assert that bitcoin will hit $1 million in 2020 like McAfee said or is he right because in 2020 the next great hype cycle starts and gathering momentum? In my point of view this is a more likely scenario, maybe bitcoin will not hit the $1 million but at least 6 figures.

To list some long term views of others:
Pantera Capital says $4 trillion is easy and $40 trillion is possible which would be 12 times the market cap of today!

Senator of Virginia sees market cap at $20 trillion by 2020.. i don't where he get's his numbers but maybe he has a good friend 😁

In this article Google trends is used as good indicator to estimate future market cap where i see also a good connection between data, if we look Google Trends it's sobering like the slump in overall market cap:

search terms: bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain, ethereum

There is a good correlation between market cap, price and frequency of searching typical terms on Google.

To finish with that an interesting view of Trace Mayer from a few months ago, seeing bitcoin at $115,000 end of 2018.. maybe he was influenced by the great bull run like everybody? 😉 We'll see..

Trace Mayer: $115,000 BITCOIN HUGE Prediction & Dollar Smash UPDATE! - video by Portfolio Wealth Global

What do you think will happen til 2020?

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Exciting times ahead steemit friends!

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