The real trigger is after 2 or 3 more halvings. By then we'd have more than 99% of the supply mined, 8 million lost forever, so that leaves about 12 million corns in circulation. I don't know how much adoption is by then, but whatever it is, it will have hit or exceeded all price predictions.
Unfortunately, that's still at least a decade away.
It’s very likely we reach at least $50,000 after May 2020 halving.
I think I already said this many times, also here on the WO.
I have a feeling a lot of people, institutional investors included, are looking at PlanB models, and probably sometimes between here and the halving we'll start seeing some kind of front running. I do agree with LFC scenario of easy 50K after halving in May20.
If the halving rally fails to materialise before or after the halving, say one year after, we still are around today's level, then we will experience a very long and cold cryptowinter II.
Institutional money, who is ready to dump a LOT of money into cryptos, see Bitcoin as an uncorrelated, high volatility asset. Something that is very precious in low volatility/negative interest rate financial environment.
If bitcoins then fails to provide those investors with a positive return, then we we'll have a serious adoption problem posing a threat to further growth.
It is good to have a Plan B (pun intended), in case things don't go the way we expect. So, I appreciate every well informed contrarian opinion even if it's bearish. It is good to play every possible scenario. The worst you are talking about - staying at the current levels long after the halving is only theoretically possible, IMHO. With almost all bitcoins mined and millions (probably even billions) new investors, I don't think this is a realistic scenario after 3 halvings. For example, after the one year bear market we saw a strong bull run with an increase more than 4 times, while most of the traders were still asking themselves if the 3k bottom was the last! There were no good news and the halving was a year away. This is a clear sign that 3K was not a real price but way below that price. The Summer action was also a good sign, since it showed that the exchanges have a good liquidity and can sustain 10K price. The bad news of bakkt's flop was a major blow to that support, but still the price in the next days fell only 15%, not 30%+ like in some previos bad days. So, even without institutional investors, we can expect the price will continue to grow. This will mean a 10K-ish rise of the price each year, so by 2025 we definitely should be above 50K. Then only 450
BTC will be mined each day and many more will be lost, as Dabs pointed out. Again, I don't think it will be the case, this is at least for me the worst bearish practically possible scenario. And since in the high volatile markets there are always explosive bull runs, it is highly probable that 50K will be touched much earlier.