Bitcoin: Why the renewed optimism?
Bitcoin enthusiasts, and fans of cryptocurrencies in general, have all noticed the “nice price hike” over the past few days. A slightly euphemistic phrase in light of the market gloom of 2018. How has this come about? Why now? Will it last?
I guess part of this is optimism could be ascribed to the fact that Bitcoin is still the market leading alt currency and pretty much any movement - up or down - will attract a greater level of media interest and in turn ‘random’ speculators
But…moving on from that simplistic viewpoint I can see that BTC is currently at $5,320 which quite a few are predicting to be the start of a bullish surge.
For me to get excited, I’d like to see some bullish momentum continue for more than just a few hours (or days even) and then we can form a more reasonable analysis.
The fact that the alt currency market has been, and will continue to be, extremely volatile leads me to express caution; it’s a long hard road to re-assume the highs of $20,000!
To borrow directly from someone much wiser that me - Aristotle "One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy."
Diverting to a closely aligned subject matter, I was interested to note recent reporting that the China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) are pushing for a ban on the mining of crypto currencies as they perceive them to be “undesirable and a waste of valuable resources”.
This should be viewed as a worrying 180 degree turn of thinking by the ‘powers that be’ especially when considering the recent Chinese Shenzhen Court ruling in late 2018 that BTC was legal in the Chinese markets.
No doubt the boardrooms of Huobi Pro, one of the world’s top ten crypto currency exchanges by volume and coincidentally founded in China, will be sitting up and taking notice!
Ok - I’ll stick my oar in here as, if nothing else, I just love observing and trying to analyse, even predict, the volatility of the Bitcoin market.
It was back in late 2017, when BTC was bubbling at almost $16,000 after a seemingly meteoric rise of 900% in that year, that Sir Howard John Davies, current Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland told Bloomberg that Bitcoin investors should be faced with a sign warning that “All the authorities can do is put up the sign from Dante’s Inferno – ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’.”
Davies’ doom-laden quote followed on from the chief of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, widely proclaiming that Bitcoin was a “fraud” and anyone “stupid enough to buy it” would eventually pay the price.
Maybe and with the benefit of hindsight, one month later after a peak of near $20,000 when BTC lost 40% of its value in January 2018, these looked like wise words.
Yet, moving on, a little later in 2018 Goldman Sachs opened a BTC trading operation in Wall Street, and earlier this year we had Jamie Dimon pretty much eating his own words as the JPM Coin prototype (based on blockchain technology) was announced in February - albeit a ‘lite-coin’ as it is still backed by the USD and so tied into the Federal Reserve; it closely resembles the Ripple model some observe.
So what of Bitcoin itself - after the lofty highs of 2017 by mid-2018 it was at around $8,000 and then by early 2019 it was down at a low of around $3,500.
All the while we have seen BTC ‘peak and trough’, as it replicates a giant financial sine wave driven by the speculators and the media - underlying all is the fact that BTC price is purely speculative so it is only ever worth what other people are willing to pay for it.
My previous and most recent comment analysis, of February this year, was that BTC was then on the up and would rise steadily over this year through to May 2020 - I offered my basic theorem as to why this could well be based on analysis of the trends since 2011.
So yes, I consider that the market has now turned and we are going to have a bull year for BTC, although I would distance myself from some of the, shall we say, more colourful characters into alt currencies, one of whom is predicting that Bitcoin will reach a $1 million by the end of 2020.
Would I bet my house on the bull continuing? Maybe not the house, but I’d certainly risk the garden shed 
I’m following the crowd - Carlo, Trudy and Rick - I’m in to alt currencies for the long-haul and enjoy speculating on BTC.
I’m a firm believer in a bull future ahead and will bet my shed accordingly!