Happy new year! 2024 was definitely an exciting year for Bitcoin, probably the best single year for Bitcoin since the earliest years.
I am worried that in the process of Bitcoin becoming a lot more mainstream, a lot of the Bitcoin economy has become more centralized via things like ETFs. (Some in the Trump administration are even talking about FDIC-insured banks being able to accept BTC and pay interest on it.) This centralization may work against the open-source ethos we care about. For example, if one ETF has all of its BTC stolen, I could see all of the ETFs getting together to fork Bitcoin and undo this theft (like ETH/ETC), and maybe they could get away with this, at least in terms of the popular perception. I suppose the only way to address this is to educate people, and also to improve trustless wallets to make them better competitors to centralized solutions.
Looking forward, it's definitely a very good thing that the Biden administration will be gone, since they were unbelievably anti-crypto. That said, I feel that the price has probably gone up too much. Here's the scenario I see as most likely at this point, though it'll probably be hilariously wrong: Since there's no particular catalyst that I can see, the price will slowly stair-step down to the $60ks; then in the last quarter of the year, there will be some recovery, and we'll end the year in the $80ks.
I hope everyone has a great 2025!
Yes, it's a good news and a bad one at the same time. We definitely want everyone to adopt Bitcoin and know about it but we want to tell people about its decentralized nature that allows anyone to use it without any boundaries. But, things are more probably moving towards centralization, however it's still good that Trump's government isn't anti-crypto like that Biden's government and that's more than enough for the community at this time.
There's chance that in future most Bitcoin will be in control of the huge and giant investment companies like Black Rock, Mirco Strategy and others that have those ETFs and who knows there comes a time when a normal person may not understand the difference between a Bitcoin and a Bitcoin ETF. We can't really do anything other than educating those people that Bitcoin is still decentralized and open source by nature, and it will always be that way.
Happy new year!