Investors keep believing what they are told by VC crypto bros and others others, that "bitcoin is ... [+]
Bitcoin (BTC) has had its moon landing already. It is stuck in orbit now; prove me wrong.
Maybe Goldman Sachs was right when they said in 2022 that BTC was like gold, a hedge against inflation and the markets. Did bitcoin ‘go moon’ already, when it was over $60,000 and super bulls were predicting $100,000 (they still are; they can’t help themselves)? Bitcoin
Looking at this chart over the last six months, BTC (blue) has landed close to Nasdaq and Tesla.
Bitcoin doesn't even look like a cryptocurrency at this point.
Year-to-date, BTC generally trades somewhere in between Nasdaq and Tesla. This is not the wild ride “crypto stock” it used to be.
BTC somewhere between Nasdaq and Tesla.
Barring hyperinflation, $100,000 bitcoin is unlikely any time soon, and maybe in my lifetime. China is deflationary, and inflation is coming down in the U.S. at the moment.
Everyone was excited this summer when bitcoin cracked $30,000 again in June and July, after doing so in April. The last time BTC was over $30,000 was in May 2022, but this was a collapse from its moonshot of over $65,000 on November 8, 2021. (A year later, I posted here that the moon landing already happened. People keep telling me it hasn’t.)
Bitcoin pricing is now where it was back in February.
September has historically been a challenging month for bitcoin. It has faced negative returns in nine of the last 13 instances (and lost gains in the last six Septembers in a row).
This time might be an exception to the September trend, says Pedro Lapenta, Head of Research at Hashdex, a global crypto-focused asset manager. Lapenta is based in São Paulo, Brazil.
“Bitcoin's volatility has recently been unusually low, hovering around the 20% mark in August. Historically, such low volatility often precedes strong positive performance in subsequent months,” Lapenta says, adding that timing the crypto market is more complex than timing the stock market.
“Oil prices have also reached their highest level for the year, fueling concerns that sustained inflation could lead to higher interest rates, which in turn could impact the price of bitcoin,” Lapenta says.
As summer draws to a close, investors are now gearing up for the fall and paying more attention to the market. Crypto markets are currently valued at around $1.05 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.
For now, the bulls are pointing to better rules defining how cryptocurrency exchanges should work and a U.S. federal court decision that favored Grayscale – a cryptocurrency exchange-traded fund manager – in their lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lawsuit, filed in June, challenged the SEC's denial of Grayscale's plans to convert its Bitcoin Trust (CBTC) into an exchange-traded fund (ETF). Grayscale already has a bitcoin fund (GBTC), though this one in the lawsuit is for spot bitcoin, so a little different in how it is managed. The win was good for bitcoin on balance, even if GBTC has already returned more than half of its gains from the news on Aug. 28.
The “bitcoin moon” believers also point to BlackRock’s
In the meantime, bitcoin is stuck trading between support levels of $25,310 and $26,015.
“Bitcoin is likely to remain in a range between $25,000 and $30,000 unless there are developments in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF or any new regulatory and economic factors in the markets,” says Rania Gule, a market analyst at XS.com, a multi-asset brokerage firm regulated to sell securities in the Seychelles, Cyprus and Australia only. XS is not open to American investors.
Bitcoin has been over-hyped for years. It’s become the electric car of crypto.
The $65,000 price tag was its moonshot, in my opinion, which is no better or worse than those on YouTube selling crypto advice. If bitcoin is going to quadruple to $100,000, as many have said for years and still say, then so can any other Nasdaq stock.
“History doesn’t have to repeat itself, but historical trends do,” says Varun Panjwani, Singapore-based founder of Web3.0 startups MetaCare and medical tourism company GlobalHealth. “New technologies are first ignored, rationally argued against, fear mongered, and finally adopted. Bitcoin has followed this route and is now in the fourth stage — adoption. The adoption of blockchain cements bitcoin as a digital gold equivalent to trade-in/out of as a safe haven. Bitcoin has stood the test of time,” he says. “Bitcoin has a solid 10 to 50-times growth ahead of it,” he says, a true believer if there ever was one with numbers like that. “Bitcoin to the moon,” he confides.
Lapenta in São Paulo thinks so, too. “We believe the best days for bitcoin are yet to come.”
Given the current economic landscape of large deficits, high inflation, and over-leveraged nations—especially in wealthier countries—both bitcoin and gold have the potential for price appreciation in the near term. For Lapenta, the riskier nature and higher growth potential for bitcoin means — at the very least — that bitcoin will “significantly outperform gold” in the coming years.
*The writer owns bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
