Ever since Bitcoin’s price underwent an unexpected upward surge nearing the end of 2017, increasing by over 2,000 in just under 12 months, there has been tons of speculation around the price of the digital currency in the foreseeable future. Recently, Arthur Hayes, the head of Seychelles-based Bitcoin mercantile exchange BitMEX, proposed that Bitcoin will skyrocket to $50,000 by the end of this year – a whopping 500% increase form its current price of $8,215.
Throughout the last 30 days, Bitcoin’s price has been hovering around the low $8,000s to the high $9,000 as it tried (and failed) to break the $10,000 barrier. Although Hayes’ prediction might seem a tad bit outlandish at this point in time, market strategists from Fundstrat have noticed that most of Bitcoin’s price gains happened in just a couple of days each year.
Source: CoinMarketCap
Even when Bitcoin’s price was nosediving at the beginning of the year, Hayes wasn’t the least bit worried about his bullish prediction. Nevertheless, he did release a disclaimer: “It’s my job to make predictions”, whether or not they become reality.
Although Bitcoin’s unpredictable fluctuating prices might turn off some of the more old-school traders, this does not faze Hayes, who is a volatility trader. In other words, the more fluctuations there is, the more money he makes.
“If it goes up, if it goes down, if you have Bill Gates calling it a fraud … Short it, I don’t care. If you think it’s going to be $1 million in a few months, great, buy it. I still don’t care. We just match trades,” Hayes said.
Numerous Other Predictions Before Hayes’
Hayes’ bullish projection of Bitcoin’s End-of-Year (EOY) price is not the first of its kind. In fact, it is one of the many so-called price predictions for Bitcoin that has been populating the crypto sphere so far.
After the major market crash in the beginning of 2018 that saw Bitcoin’s price plunge down to $8,000, the Winklewoss twins assured investors that they can expect the value of the virtual currency to go up by 40 times “someday” and that the market slump is “actually a buying opportunity”.
Then, when the market consolidated around mid-February, Thomas Glucksmann, head of APAC business development at cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin, made the same exact prediction as Hayes: “There is no reason why we couldn’t see bitcoin pushing $50,000 by December [2018].”’
Just a few days ago, Fundstrat Global’s Managing Partner and Head of Research Thomas Lee recently released a new price projection for Bitcoin, estimating that it will reach $36,000 by the end of 2019.
And of course, how could we forget about John McAfee’s infamous prediction that Bitcoin’s price will reach $1 million by 2020, as well as his unorthodox wager:
When I predicted Bitcoin at $500,000 by the end of 2020, it used a model that predicted $5,000 at the end of 2017. BTC has accelerated much faster than my model assumptions. I now predict Bircoin at $1 million by the end of 2020. I will still eat my dick if wrong. pic.twitter.com/WVx3E71nyD
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 29, 2017
In fact, there has been so many predictions about Bitcoin’s price that a Reddit user by the name chriscambridge summarized all the different price forecasts in one single sentence:
