Nonetheless, the bulls are again high on strength and enthusiasm and are maintaining that the world's leading cryptocurrency will soon soar back to $20,000. Well if you remember last year Bitcoin price at the beginning of the year 2017 was $900. And, as of in late November, it shot up from the price of $8000 to $20,000 in mid of December (and this was just two weeks of bullish and hype cycle).
However, if we talk about the Christmas vacay and the days nearby, the currency saw a dramatic ‘correction’ and by the end of December and beginning of New Year, it was trading below $14k. Not only this, Bitcoin's drop in prices was followed by a series of regulations and rumours which led to an enormous fall in the prices.
Nearly, two months after and even falling to $6,000 momentarily, the currency started gaining and saw support at $8,000. In subsequent days, bitcoin has just witnessed traction and "buy the dips" seems to profit the currency by and large. There was also this news in the media that an anonymous trader bought Bitcoin worth $344 million in a period between February 9 and February 13.
Nonetheless, Bitcoin has always remained more of a store of value rather than a currency and as enthusiasts would call it “the next logical stage of the information revolution” or the "digital gold". However, there is no doubt that bitcoin has scared the traditional financial services and threaten the established government systems who are wholly and solely dependent on Centralized systems. As Choe Heung-sik, chief of South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) says
"The whole world is now framing the outline (for cryptocurrency) and therefore (the government) should rather work more on normalisation than increasing regulation."
Bitcoin has been compelled this year by several regulatory initiatives across the world, which include the incidence of hacks on exchanges. The latest hack occurred on January 26, 2018, in Japan where roughly $532.9 million in digital money was stolen from Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.
We have seen bitcoin outperform every other asset over the previous 5 years and this for sure will continue to be the case in years to come. 2017 has actually made bitcoin mainstream and now it is preparing to become a major player in financial markets globally. The economic model is simple with bitcoin and with more adoption comes further demand and therefore an increase in price.
This is the exact reason why many analysts have suggested that soon the currency will reach $20,000 mark. However, no correct predictions can be made in the crypto-space. It was solely because of Bitcoin that open source public ledgers and decentralised ledger technologies gained popularity. Nobody would have known Blockchain before the Satoshi Whitepaper. Well, Bitcoin has made things possible!
Source: Applancer