Bitcoin has been hammered in 2018. The Cryptocurrency Market has descended into a brutal bearish market and analysts are polarized about what happens next. With Bitcoin mining difficultly steadily declining, with the most recent change at 15%, and the cost to mine a Bitcoin below the value of the asset, a troubling trend has emerged. Still, hope reigns eternal in the retail and professional financial world. Futures markets are going to launch on the Nasdaq, and yet professors of finance and skeptics around the world are calling for the ultimate drop to $0 of Bitcoin itself. With so many calls, its anyone’s guess what happens next. Either Bitcoin soars or it falls off the cliff.
First, the optimism. We in the Cryptocurrency Community have been battered. After facing down a full year of a bear market, the bad news keeps coming. In 2017 we faced news of Bitcoin bans in China and Russia and SEC rulings which weren’t so worrisome as the bull run accelerated. The Nasdaq futures market is set to open, Square Payments has a Bitcoin option and the Swiss SIX markets launched an ETP market product that is the most traded on its exchange. The Cryptocurrency Community is still enthusiastic for cryptocurrency projects from Ripple XRP to Steemit and the EOS Dapps. Firms bullish on Bitcoin from fintech to hedge funds have put big money on the cryptocurrency markets and high-dollar clients at JP Morgan Chase have expressed interest into the market.
The pessimism is summed up as a group of unknown factors. What regulations will govern the market? How far will the assets fall? Can Bitcoin survive if its price makes it unprofitable to mine? Have people lost interest in cryptocurrency as the bull market has turned to a bear market. Bitcoin lost 90% of its value in 2011 and 82% in 2015. This is nothing new.
I am personally very optimistic about the Cryptocurrency Market in 2019. Trybe, Pivot, Library Credits, Steemit and Whaleshares are where I am putting my time and am making cryptocurrency daily. Bitcoin may decrease in price to the degree that it is profitable to mine on a GPU or even CPU, which gives the people the ability to mine this cryptocurrency.
That being said, it’s anyone’s game at this point, and Bitcoin’s volatility makes our rollercoaster ride repeatable.
Follow me on Steemit and Whaleshares at @wstanley226. Friend and Follow me on Trybe.
Sources:
Publised in my Trybe account I own:
https://trybe.one/bitcoin-when-is-the-moon-shot-its-anyones-guess/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/naeemaslam/2018/12/04/bitcoin-can-the-recovery-last/#3bf3d1122928
