From the time when Satoshi Nakamoto issued his detailed famous article on how Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) works, which is another terminology for Blockchain technology, first of which would later be known as Bitcoin, the world has been taken by storm by this new form of settling financial transactions. The general response staggered between awe and fascination on the one hand, and cynicism and suspicion on the other.

Conversely, regardless of what the naysayers have to say, it is now obvious that Bitcoin is here to dominate. Bitcoin’s price has surpassed 19,000 $ in early December 2017, going well beyond lots of prophecies out there, and the fundamental Blockchain technology has been used to create multiple shapes of cryptocurrencies, counting Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. Notwithstanding Bitcoin’s price being tremendously unstable over the past couple of years, this article will try to make a few Bitcoin price estimations for 2018.

At the moment of writing this paper, the price of a single Bitcoin is $6,332,57.

Top 4 Bitcoin Price Predictions in 2018

It is very difficult to distinguish the essentials that can help us figure out its in-built value considering the way Bitcoin’s value has rise steeply over the past year. As it happens, when I started researching this article, the price of a single Bitcoin was around $12,000, 2 days and half an article later, the price of the same Bitcoin stand at $17,500 $ and now when I am updating this article the price is $6,333. Additionally, the way Bitcoin has been breaking through all previous expectations has rendered any effort at using technical analysis to make Bitcoin price predictions for 2018 irrelevant. However, there are a few key factors that should make a point, the cryptocurrency’s price going forward:

1. Adoption Rate: Metcalfe’s law declares that the value of a network upsurges as the number of users on said network increases, and this is also adoptable to Bitcoin as well.

2. Underlying technology: Even though Bitcoin is built on Blockchain technology, it is slightly substandard from a technological standpoint to other cryptocurrencies built on the same stage.

3. Arrival of new players in town: The quarrel for using Bitcoin as a means of transactions is becoming less reasonable with more digital coins growing on the scene.

4. The use of futures: Preparing a future market podium for trading Bitcoins will have a reflective effect on the young currency.

5. Supervision: Regulation is unavoidable; yet, its influences are not exact, rendering any Bitcoin estimations are becoming suspicious motives at best.

Now let’s take a look at the top 4 Bitcoin price predictions for 2018:

1. By the end of 2018 Bitcoin’s Price Will Exceed the $100,000 Stain

Initially, the dominant Bitcoin price estimation was that Bitcoin would reach the $14,000 mark by the end of 2018. Nevertheless, recent developments have blown that estimation and positive visionaries are eager on that Bitcoin will pass the $100,000 barrier within the next few months. As a matter of fact, some people, including CNBC’s Jim Cramer, are foreseeing that Bitcoin will go as far as destroy the million dollar verge one day in near future.

It’s difficult to say if it can really grasp $100,000 per coin specially bearing in mind the fact that we are already in September 2018, I would say it is not possible. Market capitalisation should be 1 trillion USD just on BTC to reach $60,000 per coin. Now the entire market cap is at $197 billions. Considering the BTC market cap was $170 billions almost a year ago, now is $109 billions and it was at $800 billions in January 2018.

As implausible as these predictions may seem at the birth, they aren’t totally improbable, seeing as Bitcoin’s price just in the past few months has been doing the unbearable. In addition, upon taking a detailed look, you will understand that these positive Bitcoin price guesses for 2018 may have some evidence. For one thing, the evolution of the amount of daily transactions using Bitcoin has outperformed the currency’s price ramble by a factor of 100! With other words, if the value of a Bitcoin has appreciated about 20 times in 2017, the simultaneous amount of trades has augmented amplified about 2000 times. Nevertheless, there is still sufficient amout of room for growth, which menas a higher adoption rate and makes meaningful the increase of expected price.

2. The Main Purpose of Using Bitcoin as of Storing Value

It is very probable that usage of Bitcoin will change from a currency that we all use, to a apparatus used to store value. To begin with, owing to the major upsurge in Bitcoin price, investors have been using Bitcoin as a tool for their investments. Furthermore, Bitcoin’s security features make it all the more eye-catching to be used as a well-known safe vault rather than a transactional currency. Moreover, Bitcoin has disputes regarding scalability (scalability refers to adding more users to the network), and all efforts to address these issues have been met with confrontation of disappointment.

Basically this means that the cost of each transaction has enlarged, and will keep rising up so long as these issues are not addressed well. Lastly, the arrival of new cryptocurrencies that are better fortified to knob a great number of transactions in contrast to Bitcoin may force the incumbent currency to take a break for a while.

3. The Appearance of a Futures Market Will Be a Crucial Point, Either Better or Worse

The prompt CME publicized that it would be fashioning a futures contract for Bitcoin come mid-December, everyone started comprehending the possible inferences this might have. On the plus side of the equation, futures simplify trading a guaranteed asset, making it more available to investors. Therefore, the rate of adoption of Bitcoin should upsurge adequately. Additionally, the cost of trading futures is fairly truncated, while an increasing rate of adoption and a motionless underlying technology have been pouring the cost of transacting via Bitcoin up. In additions to all this, futures are essential in the process of price detection, which means that they can help Bitcoin advance some price steadiness.

Nevertheless, a futures market could also mean that there will be some descending heaviness on the Bitcoin price. This stances the reason as a futures market will make it easygoing for big institutional investors to short sell Bitcoin, and take bets from both sides of the table. It endures to be seen which impacts will control the other.

4. There Is Motive to Believe that Bitcoin Is in a Bubble Which May Burst at Any Instant

Notwithstanding there being lots of sanguinity surrounding Bitcoin, there are some who are bothered that this is all a hypothetical unpredictable bubble. Initially, the fact that Bitcoin’s underlying technology is old-fashioned when contrasted to its younger peers means that unless it experiences a drastic improvement. Bitcoin won’t be able to relish its first mover benefit at all times. An additional point is that Metcalfe’s law concerning the size of networks won’t be as appropriate should Bitcoin become a vehicle for value storage, unrelatedly of the amount of people who adopted this technology. There is no doubt that a network will become useless if all the members in it are stockpiling the currency and not interacting with one another.

Another significant variable is regulation. This might come as a shock to some, predominantly due to the fact that cryptocurrencies are decentralized and impermeable to direct operation and manipulation, but governments still have the ability to regulate the usage of cryptocurrencies ramblingly. The straightforward case in this matter is how the price of Bitcoin plunged when China banned all coin interactions in the country. It is true that Bitcoin recovered after that, but this doesn’t change the fact that, should the American government make a decission to interfere, they can stimulus the price of Bitcoin. For instance, instead of creating a prohibition stage for companies from accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment method or from importing blockchain associated technology (such as Application Specific Integrated Circuits), administrations can make cryptocurrencies nearly unreachable, hereafter crashing their price and the power of utility. Some might argue that Bitcoin is a universal currency, yet the fact that the U.S. is a very large player within this space means that the activities of the U.S. government can have influential consequences for the all-inclusive space.

Closure

Bitcoin may or may not stay alive in the near future, and making Bitcoin price predictions for 2018 is similar to trying to differentiate the weather three months from now. Nevertheless, by observing the things and how they have been going, it is rational to presume that, at least for the short term, the price of Bitcoin should remain to level up and touch new elevations. Furthermore, Bitcoin has been eyewitness to one of the wickedest hostilities regarding its future this year, which ended in a sort of stale mate. Thus, without the necessary technological progressions, Bitcoin may end up being used as a safe haven for investors’ money in the short term, and may turn out to be outdated overall in the long term. Yet, the introduction of a Bitcoin futures market should be very attracting, and it is yet to be seen how this will affect the blossoming technology. And, when it’s all said and done, it is worth to come to realize that this geometric increase may be a bubble that can burst any second.

Having said that we are interested in knowing what you think. Do you think that the Bitcoin forecasts for 2018 uttering that the currency is bound to surpass $100,000 is on the money? Or, do you consider it as a bubble? What about prospects and their belongings on the cryptocurrency space in general, do you think they’ll have a vast influence or not? Please let us know, leave a comment below, and do not hesitate to ask a question to us!