“$10,000 Bitcoin in 6-10months”

Bitcoin blew past the US$5000 all time high last night and over US$5400 after its dramatic fall nearly a month ago off the China ICO and exchange closures, and the Jamie Dimon ‘fraud’ comments.  It was only 10 days ago we reported it surging past US$4400 too, as many of those catalysts for the big September dip were overcome.

More than most markets, bitcoin tends to act somewhat predictably for analysts and they were waiting for yesterday afternoon’s cues.  One of our favourite analysts made the call at this time that it was about to rally and he could see no real resistance before US$6000 and could easily go beyond.

Just a couple of days ago billionaire Wall Street legend, former Fortress Investment Group Principal and an ex-partner at Goldman Sach Michael Novogratz boldly predicted bitcoin will reach $10,000 in 6 to 10 months in an interview on CNBC.  So confident is he in the crypto market he has come out of retirement and putting $150m of his own money into a new crypto fund.

Constantly challenged by the interviewer about whether bitcoin is a bubble, he clarified that yes it could be called a bubble, and indeed said "cryptocurrencies were likely the biggest bubble of his lifetime," but he explained as follows:

“Remember, bubbles happen around things that fundamentally change the way we live…..The railroad bubble. Railroads really fundamentally changed the way we lived. The internet bubble changed the way we live. When I look forward five, 10 years, the possibilities really get your animal spirits going.”

When asked if this were like the dot.com bubble where there were huge losses on it ‘popping’ he sagely reminded us that at the height of the dot.com bubble, it had a market cap of around $6.5 trillion.  Comparing that to the current total market cap of all crypto / blockchain assets of just $200b he reinforced that we are still very much in the infancy of this ‘bubble’ if that is the term you want to use.  He reminds us that no one would have predicted the extent of the internet on our lives in 2017 back in 1997 and said that is where we effectively are now in the likely coming disruption of the blockchain.  He states that bitcoin is the ‘bellwether’ of the entire decentralised revolution.

It would appear that even JPMorgan are having second thoughts, just one month after CEO Jamie Dimon labelling it a fraud they said overnight they are indeed "very open minded to the potential use cases....for digital currencies that are properly regulated"….

Speaking of breaking through technical price resistance lines, gold, at the time of writing is just $5 off the key line of US$1300 with some analysts suggesting if it breaks that it is firming into a new bull rally as well.

Let us leave you with this quote from eToro’s UK MD, Iqbal Gandham:

“Recent criticism from industry and regulation crackdowns in China and Russia spooked markets in recent weeks and caused the Bitcoin price to plummet. So we expect some investors to be surprised by Bitcoin bouncing back to this record high so soon afterwards.

“Yet Bitcoin was designed to operate outside of the influence of governments and central banks, and is doing exactly that. So to us, this bounce back in price is no surprise.

“In reality, whilst we’re excited to see Bitcoin hit this record high, this is just the beginning for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a lot further to go than this price point to become a real world currency, as it was designed to one day be. Most are unaware that in future people will not spend a single Bitcoin. Instead people would spend the underlying tokens, called Satoshis, in the same way we spend coins and not a bar of gold. A single Satoshi is only worth $0.00005 currently. Clearly, for this to gain spending power, the price of a Bitcoin will need to be significantly higher than $5,000.

“This price peak may boost more support for the bubble argument we’ve seen from investors in recent months. But we continue to argue these calls on bubble territory are coming far too early in the story for Bitcoin.

“This record is an exciting milestone and sign of market confidence in the outlook for Bitcoin and the underlying technology behind the cryptocurrency, Blockchain. But we expect many more milestones like this to come.”