No need to hit the panic button. Ran Neu-Ner, a South African investor who was savvy enough to invest in his first bitcoin half a decade ago, said the recent volatility in the bitcoin price is nothing new and in fact, bitcoin is headed to $20,000 in 2018. He made the remarks to CNBC, where he also suggested that things could get worse before they get better, pointing to a floor for the bitcoin price of about $8,000 but probably not below $7,500, pointing to “retail money” that’s poured in.
“We’ve seen bitcoin go up, and we’ve seen bitcoin go down. We’ve seen it go down 50% at a time. But it’s quite a resilient currency/commodity/asset that just keeps going up afterward,” said Neu-Ner.
He reminded the host about his previous visit a couple of months ago when bitcoin was trading below $8,000 only to spike to nearly $20,000 shortly thereafter.
Despite his bullish call on bitcoin, Neu-Ner’s money is on Ethereum, which he says is run by “the smartest people in the world,” in reference to the developers who he recently got to know at a conference held in Cancun.
He touts Ethereum for its multiple use cases, ranging from hedging to betting, to voting, for instance, all on the Ethereum network. Meanwhile, bitcoin’s use cases are twofold — as a currency or a store of value, the latter of which is how Neu-Ner views the cryptocurrency, referencing it as “digital gold.”
Meanwhile, he points out it’s only been about a year that cryptocurrencies have become accessible to the retail investor, and they’ve not even attained wide-scale adoption yet. “2018 is the year where the mechanisms to allow retail consumers to get into cryptocurrencies start to open themselves up,” he said, adding that it will stabilize the price.
Neu-Ner vs. Roubini: Biggest Bubble Ever?
American economist and chairman of Roubini Macro Associates, Nouriel Roubini, on the other hand, believes bitcoin is the “biggest bubble in human history,” one that he told Bloomberg “is finally crashing.” If he’s right, the bitcoin bubble must be greater even than US housing bubble that he forecasted in 2006, two years prior to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. That prediction won him accolades and the nickname Dr. Doom, which he apparently is still making use of today. An avid user of Twitter, Roubini often tweets about bitcoin, mostly documenting as he says, ‘the mother of all crypto bubbles go bust.
If bitcoin is the biggest bubble in human history, it must surpass even the stock market crash of 1929, when investors lost $25 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions in today’s dollars compared to bitcoin’s present market cap of $150 billion. The Crisis Economics author also likes bitcoin to the internet bubble, tulip mania of the 1600’s and London’s South Sea bubble in the 1700’s — all of which Roubini says bitcoin surpasses for a bursting bubble.