Did you miss out on the Bitcoin Bandwagon? Own some but want to know if you should sell them or wait? I reached out to 10 Bitcoin experts for their informed predictions about Bitcoin over the next 5 years. The following is what they shared with me.
Irving Gonzalez, Day Trader, Founder of Crypto Royals
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Why I Know What I’m Talking About:
Crypto is a full time job and hobby of mine.
Here’s The Inside Scoop:
Bitcoin has a low market cap and is not where near a bubble as everyone might claim. I mean gold’s market cap is at the trillions, while Bitcoin is tiny and only at $300 billion. I could easy see reach $50,000 to $100,000 per Bitcoin, if nothing drastic happens to it .
I don’t think Bitcoin will be the currency of the future, but will become more like internet social security for millennials. There are many other cryptocurrencies that have better technology and future applications than Bitcoin. I like Bitcoin, but I’m not not sold on it remaining the top dog for long. I’m sold on other coins that can do Bitcoin’s job so much better.
Bitcoin is the first, but not the best. I view Bitcoin like the first model T Ford ever made. It was amazing and groundbreaking, but as time passed on we have faster and better options. I mean would you rather drive a 1908 Ford or getting in a 2018 Lambo?
Another 9 Bitcoin Experts Share Their Predictions About The Fate Of Bitcoin Over The Next 5 Years Matt C. Pinsker, Adjunct Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Professor Matt C. Pinsker is an expert in homeland security and criminal justice. An officer in the US Army Reserves, he holds a JD and LLM in National Security & US Foreign Relations and is an Adjunct Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). A prolific writer, Matt Pinsker has authored a textbook in national security as well as multiple articles published in peer reviewed legal journals. Formerly, Mr. Pinsker worked as a prosecutor and magistrate, and also practices criminal defense. He has trained countless police officers, federal agents, attorneys, members of the military, and others responsible in the nation’s security.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
We can expect to see the use of Bitcoin grow and expand over the next 5 years, and unfortunately, much of it will be for the wrong reasons. Although the impetus of creating a digital currency was legitimate concern about privacy and freeing the markets from government control, that is not what is driving Bitcoin’s ever increasing usage. Cybercrime is annually a half-trillion dollar enterprise and growing. We are seeing online sales increase for drugs, weapons, child pornography, and (stolen) financial information. For those behind this criminal activity, Bitcoin is the most secure payment method because it is nearly anonymous. This enables online marketplaces where people can purchase illegal goods as if they were purchasing children’s toys on Amazon, with little fear of government tracking. As these underground markets continue to grow, so too will demand for Bitcoin.
There is a possibility that Bitcoin could disappear, but that is entirely dependent on governments and hackers, and not its users. As a way to curb criminal activity, governments are looking to find a way to track Bitcoin payments just like they can currently track ordinary transactions. If they are successful, the value and usage of Bitcoin will plummet because, for most of its users, the loss of anonymity will defeat the whole point of Bitcoin. An issue of lessor concern is that Bitcoin could be hacked and stolen from a user’s accounts. Already, North Korea is suspected of being involved in some attempted Bitcoin hacking. This issue already exists with regular funds in financial institutions, and for many people in criminal enterprise (like drug dealers) being robbed from time-to-time is part of the cost of doing business. However, should it ever reach the point that hacking becomes so bad that Bitcoin is unreliable, then its value and usage will plummet.
Caleb Chen, Editor in Chief, Block Explorer
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Caleb Chen believes in a philosophy that is simple and contagious: Decentralization is changing the world, join in or get left behind. Caleb is a graduate of the University of Virginia where he studied Economics, East Asian Studies, and Mathematics. In 2016, he was part of the first class of MSc in Digital Currency graduates from the University of Nicosia. Caleb has has been a journalist and consultant in the Bitcoin space since 2013. He is currently the Director of External Communications at Private Internet Access and the Editor in Chief at Block Explorer News.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Over the next 5 years, I predict that we will see the Bitcoin market cap overtake the market cap of an entire continent. It doesn’t matter what the Bitcoin price is in 5 years. By the end of the next 5 years, the world will have come to accept that blockchain will change the world as much or more than the Internet did. Bitcoin as Digital Currency and a store of value will continue to grow as more people learn about Bitcoin — that is to say that the next 5 years will also be replete with both severe bubbles and crashes. My last prediction is that a country will start utilizing Bitcoin technology for their own Digital Currency in the next 5 years. The next 5 years of Bitcoin are going to be even more exciting than the last 5 years.
Marc van der Chjis, founder and director of Hut 8, a bitcoin mining company, the founder and partner of First Block Capital, a cryptocurrency investment fund, and co-founder and chairman of First Coin Capital, a global ICO advisory firm
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Marc van der Chijs is a Dutch serial Internet entrepreneur and crytpo investor based in Canada. He co-founded Chinese leading online video site Tudou.com in Shanghai in 2004 and helped to take it public in 2011. In 2013 he moved to Vancouver where he joined CrossPacific Capital as a partner, investing in financial technologies, especially in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Marc started investing in Bitcoin in 2013 and has spoken at many Bitcoin and blockchain companies over the years. Among others he is a founder of First Block Capital, the first fully licensed Canadian crypto asset management company, First Coin Capital, an ICO investment bank, and the FBC Bitcoin Trust, the first regulated Bitcoin investment vehicle in Canada.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Bitcoin will evolve from just a store of value to a medium of exchange over the next couple of years. This will happen because of second layer solutions such as the Lightning Network, that will lead to widespread adoption and to a user experience that is just as easy as debit or credit cards. This will allow hundreds of thousands of transactions per second (much more than credit card networks) and more importantly, it will allow micropayments. Bitcoin will change the way the Internet works because of these micropayments. The advertising model will likely be replaced by a model where you pay very small amounts of bitcoin in order not to see ads, and social networks like Facebook will be disrupted because users will now get paid for their content instead of the social network.
At the same time bitcoin will remain a store of value that will slowly start to replace gold. Millennials will not invest in gold anymore but will opt for bitcoin instead. In 5 years the bitcoin price will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it will lead to a huge redistribution of wealth from the older generation to the younger generation. Bitcoin will change the world!
Brad Hines, Startup Advisor and Investor at www.bradfordhines.com
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Startup Advisor, Investor, serial entrepreneur founder of YumDomains.com and Nerdplaythings.com. Personal finance writer and creator of board games Recollection and Cheechowban. Degree in finance. www.bradfordhines.com/press
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Bitcoin may not even be the leading cryptocurrency anymore. In the same vein as how “Friendster” was the social media network recieving venture backing in 2002, and a household name shortly later, now you are hard pressed to find a younger millenial that even knows what it was. So as facebook emerged when the dust settled, some of the other cryptocurrencies are more based on more robust blockchain technology than that of bitcoin, bitcoin is simply the current most-known. It’s possible that bitcoin won’t be the first widely-adopted digital currency, and instead that a so-called altcoin will bear the title (Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, etc.)
Eric Allred, Chief Executive Officer, Blockchain Technology Partners
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Launching multi-strategy hedge fund that will focus on investment in trading, mining, and investing in blockchain technology-related companies. Also, feel strongly about stating I don’t think there are any “true” experts in this industry, would prefer to be referred to as an enthusiast or believer
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Goes to the “moon” or goes to zero. Unlike gold it has to compete with other currencies (LTC, DASH, etc.). Unlike the gold rush, the speed and ease at which users can collect information and act on it is faster than ever before which I believe has strongly contributed to the pandemonium. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another currency dethrone Bitcoin. It has severe scalability issues and with the hard forks and fragmentation of the community I believe you could see it lose support long-term.
From the projects I’ve researched the most effective protocols have nodes adding resources to the network as they join the network.
With Bitcoin additional nodes require more resources to be consumed to simply protect a larger network; more network relaying, and keeping a larger network on the same page and synchronized.
To play devil’s advocate, it also acts great as a store of value despite the volatility for countries facing hyper inflation or for citizens that want to protect their money from situations like the 2013 Cyrpess Bail-in.
Bitcoin has become the eponym for cryptocurrency, and every great technology has needed a bubble to get the focus and attention required to go mainstream. I see massive gains, massive bloodshed, and a whole lot of turmoil over the next 5 years for the entire marketplace. It’ll be interesting.
Jonathan Chester, Founder & President of Bitwage
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Jonathan Chester is founder/President of Bitwage and Inwage as well as a contributor on Forbes for all things bitcoin & blockchain related. Jonathan has been in the Bitcoin industry as an early adopter since 2013, running Bitwage, the most popular payroll & invoicing platform built on top of Bitcoin. His second company, Inwage, leverages Bitwage’s 18k workers for IT consulting, IT development and recruitment services to build out ICOs and the projects behind those ICOs for other companies. Jonathan has been featured in Les Echos, Entrepreneur magazine, and Quartz. He has consulted members of the European Parliament, dutch banks & regulators and the California Senate regarding regulation of the blockchain industry. He has spoken at conferences such as Viva Technology, SCAPayments, Transact15, BIP001 and CoinAgenda.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Bitcoin is the best store of value that we have ever seen. The previous best store of value was gold. Why not the US dollar? It is because of inflation. If you wanted to save money for your great great grandchildren, they would likely have more value if you stored the money in gold instead of the US dollar. This is due to the scarcity of gold. Unlike the US Dollar, there is a finite amount of gold that exists. Bitcoin is perfectly scarce. There will ever only be 21 million Bitcoins ever created and, like gold, it does not rely on any particular government to maintain its value. However, unlike gold, Bitcoin is digital.
This means it is easier to hold, easier to carry and easier to spend. Try buying something online with gold. While gold may have some value due to its ability to conduct electricity, this is not what drives its 7.5 trillion US dollar valuation. That valuation is driven by its scarcity, its separation from government production and the trust that people have that other people will continue to value its aesthetic qualities. Given that Bitcoin is perfectly scarce, is separate from government production, builds trust through the ability to control your money online without any intermediaries for the first time and is easier than gold to maintain, secure and transact with, it is easy to see that Bitcoin will compete with gold’s 7.5 trillion US dollar market capitalization.
My company, Bitwage, interacts with digital currency exchanges around the world. By speaking with the exchange owners in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Zimbabwe, and watching how local users interact with these exchanges, we have come to see that people in these countries are leveraging Bitcoin as a store of value today. Within the next five years, we will come to see Bitcoin, currently valued at 280 billion US dollars, grow to compete with gold and perhaps become the most valuable store of value.
Brian D. Evans, CMO ShipChain, Inc. 500 Entrepreneur
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Brian D. Evans is an Inc. 500 Entrepreneur, the founder of one of the fastest growing advertising and marketing agencies in America, has been ranked as the 4th most influential business journalist in the world, and the Founder of Influencive. Brian has millions of followers for himself and his brand and is regarded as one of the leading thought leaders in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Millions of people read his content every month.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
We’re at the precipice of a digital revolution that spans the entire globe and every industry on earth. There are no borders to this revolution. Every area and aspect of business and life is being disrupted by blockchain technology. Bitcoin was the one that started it all, and there are exciting times ahead for this wave of disruption. Ethereum spawned a new round of disruptors that will disrupt the Uber’s of the world. This opportunity and technology has allowed for a round of companies that will revolutionize old unsexy industries such as the the freight and logistics industry, thanks to companies like ShipChain. We’re only at the beginning of this blockchain era.
Tom Waters, Owner, Everydaysaleshq.com
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Tom Waters is an electronic payments expert who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and business professionals scale their companies by reducing costs and implementing growth strategies. He has been evangelizing the value of cryptocurrencies since 2013. His YouTube channel, EverydaySalesHQ, features a fresh and experimental format showcasing lessons in sales, business-building, and marketing. Tom has spent over thirteen years showing businesses how to save money, increase efficiency, and scale their existing business model to operate without constant direct involvement.
His experience in legacy payment institutions has afforded him an inside look at how cryptocurrencies could disrupt a multi-billion dollar industry.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Many people try to measure the future value of Bitcoin through the lens of a financial service analysis. While it might serve several financial benefits, Bitcoin is best described as a messaging technology. But instead of sending texts, e-mails, or computer files, it sends records of transaction data.
For comparison, in the early-ish days of the internet, a new file transfer format called Peer to Peer (P2P) swept the globe. Apps like Kazaa and Napster removed the need for a central file sharing website and empowered the average person to share their data with the world. Bitcoin (in its current form) is to gold in a way that is similar to what P2P was to file sharing. We used to need physical vaults, trusted by central third parties to store and move our gold.
So when people look at the huge rise in price over time, they are simply witnessing the first financial asset to mimic the technology adoption curve we’ve seen plenty of times in recent years. Even though Bitcoin has been around for about 9 years, it’s still relatively low on the adoption curve as a store of value.
If Bitcoin remains solely as a modern store of value and reaches a market cap equivalent to gold, it can rise as high as $500,000 per coin. If you follow the traditional technology adoption curve that has accurately predicted the rise of the adoption rate of Facebook, the Internet, the Telephone and other disruptive inventions, Bitcoin could rise to as high as $100,000 or more within the next five years.
Certain barriers may keep the six figure coin from becoming a reality such as an international collaboration to ban cryptocurrencies, an alternative technology unseating Bitcoin as the dominant store of value, and an existing limitation on how fast transactions can be processed. But the first two are extremely unlikely, and the third is being diligently worked on by some of the brightest developers in the world. My money’s on Bitcoin booming for many more years.
Clay Space, Blockspace Media
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Why I Know More About Bitcoin than Your High School Buddy:
Fascinated by the world of cryptocurrency, Clay has been a member of the bitcoin community since 2014 and used the currency to raise over $1 million in funds for his transmedia project BACK TO EARTH. Outside of the project, Clay Space is an actor, writer, producer, and founder of Blockspace Media, a company utilizing blockchain applications as an interactive layer to power a multi-platform story world. His entertainment credits include Better Call Saul, The Night Shift, and Manhattan, as well as multiple webseries and a feature length film.
Here’s the Inside Scoop:
Bitcoin has a track record for being difficult to predict, and it will most likely continue to make many “experts” look completely ridiculous in hindsight. I avoid price targets because that sends the wrong idea to newcomers, but Bitcoin is one more step towards a global society. Bitcoin will help to unify people from all ages and countries and ethnicities better than any one government or corporation.
Bitcoin is more than a store of value or a currency. It is a movement. And this movement is creating the framework for the first financial social network on the planet. And when you decentralize finance, you bring the world together in unimaginable ways. Eric Chen, Student at NYU Stern, Blockchain Analyst at Innovating Capital, Founder of NYU’s first cryptocurrency club
Source: Cryptocurrency