Alright so we blasted through the big goal of $10,000, went up to ~$11,500, and then experienced a correction and now it's hanging around 9500 - 10750 basically.
We've got a month left in the year. How high do you think we'll go?
I think we'll be somewhere in the $13k-$15k range come new years. Rising a thousand dollars isn't a big deal anymore now that it has crossed $10k, so next real barrier is maybe $15k and definitely $20k. Hitting $13k-15k by new years should put BTC on track to hit $20k in the first quarter of the year, which in turns sets up a good possibility of hitting $50k next year.
We need to consolidate the price around $9500-$10000 for a week or so before we attempt to break the all time high. If the all time high is broken, then we can go into another FOMO frenzy reaching these kind of prices, but I think it would be healthy to stop for a while and consolidate, ideally above $10000, but if we stay around that nice $9500-$10000 range we are still in a good position. If we keep retesting lower prices we may dip for a while until the next year FOMO frenzy kicks in again as all the idiots that still didn't buy this cheap finally do. CME, Nasdaq futures and Lightning network will make it go $50,000 by the end of 2018, pretty easily in fact.
I agree with pretty much everything you said (except I don't think LN will hit in 2018 and I'm not even sure it'll end up being the best second layer solution). I do think it will consolidate between 9500-10500 for the most part, but that'll probably only last a few days. Buy pressure too strong at these prices to keep it in consolidation for very long.
Yeah if things go well in 2018 $50k is totally doable. If it ends the year even at just $12k, and next year the doubling rate slows down from ~3.5 months this year to 6 months for next year, that puts it at $48k end of 2018. And if hedge funds and ETFs enter the Bitcoin space next year there is no way the doubling rate slows all the way down to 6 months so that would mean very high chance of over $50k in 2018, possibly significantly higher than $50k.