By Olusegun Ogundeji
By now, many Bitcoin enthusiasts are trying to work out a realistic projection for Bitcoin over the next few years.
From analyst Ronnie Moas who sees a $15,000-$20,000 value by late 2020 to independent views that point at $1 mln per Bitcoin, some of these predictions seem outrageous and outright impossible.
Following the activation of the SegWit protocol and early testing of the Lightning Network that SegWit enables, the Bitcoin market has been gradually edging to a capitalization of almost $80 billion. Bitcoin’s market capitalization is now about 50% of the entire crypto market and has now exceeded 1% of gold’s estimated $7 tln market cap. Bitcoin is nearly half of Visa’s $200 bln cap.
Bitcoin’s daily transaction numbers have been growing steadily. According to Coinmarketcap, Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is about 400,000 BTC per day while only 1728 new Bitcoins are created through mining each day.
By the next halving in 2020, the number of Bitcoins mined each day will drop to 864. By the subsequent halving in 2024, there will only be 432 new Bitcoins produced each day. Some time around 2032, nearly 99% of all bitcoin to ever exist (20,671,875) will have been mined. After that, people will spend the next 100 years trying to get their hands on the remaining 1.6%.
At some point, people are likely to realize that nearly all the Bitcoins ever to exist have already been mined, and there aren’t nearly enough Bitcoins to go around. When this happens, there will likely be major “fear of missing out” and prices should climb accordingly. If the price continues to rise as it has this year (going by the $689.80 Bitcoin price as of early July last year), Bitcoin will reach about $20,000 by the next block reward halving in 2020.