$50k in 2 years
$100k in 3-4 years
$500k in 10 years???
I think $500k is possible, though not in 2020. I think most likely Bitcoin will end up somewhere between $100k and $500k and probably won't actually hit $500k.
I do not know how or where you base your computation/prediction but I believe it will not touch $50k in 3 years time. It will need a huge audience and huge capitalization in order to get in that price and as we can observe, Bitcoin is somehow slow on getting into $10k plus. Even though Bitcoin is rallying today, who know it might be a bull Trap though I hope it is not.
Don't know how you are saying slow getting to $10k...it's been racing from $1k to $10k this year and will very likely attain $10k next month. Is 10x growth in one year slow???
"It will need a huge audience and huge capitalization"...yeah, and what do you think has been happening to Bitcoin this past year? It's called exponential growth. Even if Bitcoin were to only grow linearly, which it obviously will not, that'd still put it close to $40k in 3 years. And that's with linear growth, so that is way lower than what Bitcoin growth will actually be, because Bitcoin has never grown at a linear rate.
My computations are based on the rate of growth slowing down a lot after this year as naturally it will as the market cap grow and it gets harder to move. The price will likely hit $10k this year, that's 900% growth. If we assume a major slowdown to 200% growth in 2018 that gives us $30k, and then slowing down to under 100% growth in the following years puts it at about $50k in 2019 and $100k within two years after that. And honestly the growth could very well be much quicker than this. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see >$30k, >$60k, >$100k these next three years.
As for the reasons why it's pretty obvious to me that this will happen:
- Futures contracts are supposed to start next month, people on wall street are all saying this will serve as the "all ok" for institutional investors to start jumping into Bitcoin. Hedge funds will start directly investing in Bitcoin, as one $100 billion UK hedge fund has already said they will do once they see futures implemented, and Goldman Sachs CEO has also recently said he is considering it. Eventually they will all jump on board. Hedge fund participation alone might raise the price by tens of thousands of dollars over the next few years. Then there are also ETFs which allow your average non-rich investor to invest in Bitcoin as part of this standard financial vehicle, so that'll bring in a lot of normal people who invest their money but only trust standard financial instruments for their investments. ETFs alone could also raise the price by 5 digits.
- Bitcoin integration in popular payment apps. This just began yesterday with Square. No doubt in the next year or two Venmo and Paypal and other will follow suit in order to compete. This means that suddenly millions more people can buy bitcoin directly from the mainstream payment apps that they already use, rather than having to research how to get Bitcoin and what its all about. This normalizes it a lot. Not to mention Coinbase has pretty much been the only good fast easy way to buy Bitcoin up until this point, so have a whole industry of tech companies offering Bitcoin buy/sell services rather than just one company will grow Bitcoin adoption a lot. Also another huge boost to Bitcoin will come from when Square has Bitcoin fully integrated and they allow payments through it, hundreds of thousands of shops who use Square's point of sale system will automatically be able to start taking Bitcoin as payment.
-User adoption is growing as word is spreading and so organic user growth will continue to grow at an ever expanding rate for years to come. This alone will raise the price by tens of thousands of dollars the next few years.
-Amazon Bitcoin payments. This will absolutely happen within the next three years I believe and it will be huge for legitimizing Bitcoin as a major player for payments online.
-Governments are starting to realize the need to write Bitcoin into the legal framework of the economy by enacting regulations for Bitcoin. This legitimizes it in a legal sense and will make many people more comfortable with the idea of buying Bitcoin.
The only question is can bitcoin development innovate enough to keep up with demand! So far they are kind of failing to keep up with demand, but if they can succeed in the long run there's no reason why Bitcoin can't be 6 digits in under 5 years.