Bitcoin $10,000: What Does It Mean?

in #news7 years ago

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
December 2, 2017

Bitcoin $10,000? Already? It seems like just a few months ago that I was writing about the price of one bitcoin surpassing the price of one ounce of gold.

Oh wait. I was. "Bitcoin Over Gold: What Does It Mean?" was written in March 2017. Fast forward 8 months and here we are with the price of one bitcoin topping $10,000. $10,138.06 as I type these very words, to be precise.

But what's in a number? By the time you read these words the price could very well have leapt to $15,000 and it could just as easily have plunged to $1,000. (If you're curious you can check the current price here.)

Don't believe me? Then you clearly haven't been watching the bitcoin price at any point over the past 5 years. Exhilarating spikes and dizzying plunges happen all the time. When it comes to crypto trading, volatility is the name of the game.

This, of course, is manna from heaven for the financial press, which can now generate a seemingly never-ending stream of "Oh My God! Bitcoin Is Exploding!" and "Oh My God! It's A Crypto Bloodbath!" stories, just swapping out one story for the other every day or two (sometimes multiple times a day). But all of these stories are a sham.

Case in point: ZeroHedge's story from earlier this week, "Crypto Carnage Continues As The Fed Warns Digital Currencies Could 'Pose Serious Financial Stability Issues.'" They manage to invoke the "bloodbath" description in the very first sentence to discuss the "clawback" from bitcoin's flirtation with $11,000 earlier in the week. As you may have noticed, bitcoin plunged back down to $9,000 on Thursday morning, prompting traders to claim (for the 198th time, in case you're keeping track) that the end was nigh for this silly experiment in internet play money.

To illustrate their point they invoked this chart:


Complete with plunging red arrows to help the reader understand what downward movement on a chart looks like!

Scary looking, I suppose. Until you put it in context. When you look at the full history of the bitcoin price chart, do you see the tiny blip that was being hailed as a "bloodbath?" Neither do I.


Maybe we need some red arrows from the ZeroHedge team to help us see it.

In fact, the article gets even better. It goes on to explain that "there is no immediate catalyst" for this "carnage" and then includes a lengthy section on how the price could hit $20,000 by the end of the year. That's quite a lot of base-covering for a site claiming to have zero hedge.

Now, don't get me wrong: this isn't meant as a hit piece on ZeroHedge. If anything, ZH is one of the few sites that is willing to print a range of stories on bitcoin, from the absurdly bullish to the absurdly bearish and everything in between, so it's not a bad place to hear from both the bitcoin boosters and the crypto critics. But this example article does demonstrate some very important things about the bitcoin phenomenon:

  1. Anyone's random guess about the future price is as good as anyone else's.
  2. Spikes and plunges seldom bear any direct relation to any identifiable news stories or events.
  3. People are so hungry for information that articles will be churned out (and consumed by eager readers) despite the fact that they are devoid of any substance whatsoever.

Here's the fact of the matter: bitcoin is in a speculative bubble right now. The price is being driven up by intense interest from people who are just hearing of cryptocurrencies for the first time, people who have been on the sidelines but can't bear to feel they're missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime, and, more importantly, banksters and fraudsters.

It is the latter two categories of bubble blowers that, unsurprisingly, have a lot of bitcoin watchers (even some dyed-in-the-wool bitcoin die hards) wary.

The banksters are finding their way into the market in the usual way: derivatives. Why waste your time buying and selling bitcoin directly like a regular, day-trading chump when you can be a high-falutin' 21st century Gordon Gekko trading bitcoin derivatives? Well, never fear! The good folks at the CME and CBOE Futures Exchanges are going to be launching bitcoin futures trading later this month in a move that was just approved by the CFTC.

And then there are the fraudsters. If you haven't heard of the tethercoin/Bitfinex disaster-in-waiting, there are any number of resources online to get you up to speed. Suffice it to say, Mt. Gox was not the only super shady exchange scam in bitcoin history and it certainly won't be the last.

Combine all of this with the inevitable (and not undeserved) Tulipmania comparisons and the stage seems perfectly set for yet another installment of the quarterly bitcoin crash.

But every quarterly crash in the past has been followed by exponential growth that has brought bitcoin to new heights. Will this time be any different? Are we about to see another +20% "correction" and another period of exponential growth? Or the bursting of the bubble altogether? Or no correction at all on the way to $20,000?

Well, here's my controversial answer: It doesn't matter.

That's right, it doesn't matter. If you're investing in bitcoin because you want to make some quick bucks, you're an idiot. Now to be sure, there are a lot of millionaire idiots out there, and if all you want in life is lots of zeroes in your bank account, then have fun. Maybe you'll buy low, sell high, cash out with a lot of Federal Reserve Notes and live "happily" ever after (by which I mean "until the Federal Reserve Notes become toilet paper"). Or maybe you'll buy in at the top and lose everything. Again: it doesn't matter.

Why not? It's like saying that the story of the internet revolution was the story of what happened to this or that trader during the dot-com bubble. Yes, maybe Trader A made a fortune and Trader B lost it all and Trader C broke even, but on the world-historical scale, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the world has transitioned from a pre-World Wide Web economy to a World Wide Web economy, and we are still dealing with the ramifications of that. The first bubble of speculative investment surrounding that transition and its inevitable popping is now a footnote in that history, just as the daily price movement of bitcoin (measured in fiat dollars) will be a footnote in future history.

The main story is the transition from the pre-cryptocurrency economy to a cryptocurrency economy. Given the lingering and still unresolved question of the scaling debate and the many forks and splits it has caused so far, it is by no means certain that bitcoin will even survive at all, or that the crypto that emerges with the "bitcoin" name will bear any resemblance whatsoever to the central bank-less, borderless, instantaneous and practically-free medium of exchange that was originally promised to bitcoin's (mostly libertarian) early user base. Again: it doesn't matter.

What matters is that the cryptocurrency idea will survive this period, whatever happens with the bitcoin bubble, just as the World Wide Web didn't go away when the dot-com bubble burst. Now you might love that fact or you might hate that fact, but it's a fact.

As with everything else, it's a question of what we do with this fact. Can a cryptocurrency that lives up to the "pirate money" ideal be created, or is the idea destined to be neutered, co-opted and wrestled back into the service of the banksters?

Now that is the question that matters. But that is a question for another day. In the meantime, better prepare some popcorn. This is going to be one hell of a ride.

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Im really curious about what will be the top end... Because BTC can't keep moving up endless... I think.....

two things to say about this: 1. i think the price is indicative of a limited supply. people are waking up to how pernicious inflation really is. 2. regarding the popping of the bitcoin bubble. this will happen when the next gen coins really start doing the things the set out to do. DASH and Cardano are good examples of these.

Bitcoin is considered to be the gate to enter in cryptos, therefore, if Bitcoin price goes up it benefits alts as well.
Bitcoin is now at 11663$ :D

Right, and long term prospects are great for bitcoin, especially because of CME futures coming soon.
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@petermail/how-big-bitcoin-will-b

True, Steem is now exploding 1.4$

If someone is saying his investment in Bitcoin grew up x1000 times, do not think this will also happen to yours. Do you really believe in $10 mln bitcoin?

In your life time?

Really?

This has been one hell of a ride. And this will continue.
I'm glad I'm on this route.
Since 2011.

Good insight!

I strongly believe massive down turns are out of the picture for bitcoin now. Its seriously been through the ringer and every time the price increases to all new highers.

We had China ban it, then as the price kept going up they said oh shit perhaps we should start trading it again lol

Hard forks like crazy which even the largest ended up sky rocketing bitcoin prices instead

Coinbase FBI says they want inside scoop on traders and still goes up.

Every time there has been a correction but every time we hit new highs which means one thing.

Demand continues to skyrocket and for the foreseeable future will continue to while demand is in a limited supply.

Most HODLers say they wont let go of their bitcoin till we hit 100k + which will further reduce the supply. I see us getting very close to the 50k mark in 2018

1azb2z.jpg

I agree, and disagree. I think that BITCOIN in some form will most certainly achieve those lofty heights. At current BTC has brand name recognition, just like HERTZ before AVIS (BTC, BCH).. and then came Enterprise (X coin unknown at the time). I think that BTC is a good basis point, but the legacy developers are strangling it by failing to advance the technology, thus allowing splits to occur. In order to keep market share they should be advancing technologies in order to kill spin offs before they can even start. Evaluate a technology, segwit, lightning, block size increase (this needs to happen seriously) and implement it before a competitor can. Think (Myspace vs Facebook), Sure Myspace was first, had the market, but failed to adapt to the competition and either buy them up or crush them before they could gain a following; thus FB to murdered them. In the short term the charts seem to indicate a downward trend before consolidation to reach these lofty highs you speak of.

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@pawsdog/12-2-2017-the-market-view-and-trading-outlook

@pawsdog

BTC is kind of planning its own path though and when you start to look at it it seems like a solid and understandable plan. They look at bitcoin as a store of value (what is currently used to get into the markets and then start trading with) They believe other chains over top of BTC are what will be used for day to day transactions such as the lighting network. When you start putting all the peices together it increased the value of BTC because lets be honest here everything trades for BTC. Its going to be very hard and a long time till another coin overpowers BTC in terms of branding. Right now when you talk about crypto it always starts with bitcoin if you try and start it with Ethereum for example they have no idea what you are talking about. Love the input btw voted ya up :D

I again agree and disagree to a point. I believe that those with a good understanding see it as a long term store of value, not a payment method for everyday things. At a blistering 7 transactions per second, that is really all it can be. I also see a great many other players as well notably miners and governments whom in reality control the block chain, though we wish it were not so.

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@pawsdog/is-bitcoin-really-decentralized-or-are-we-being-led-like-lambs-to-the-slaughter

Not being a conspiracy theorist, but I have to look at the finances of the miners and take that into consideration in terms of price, future growth and sustainability. As the blocks get more difficult, the costs to solve them will increase proportionately to a point of diminished returns that can only be offset by an exponential increase in transaction fees, appreciation in price and block rewards. At a point all the coins will be mined, so that well will run dry and be removed from the equation. Necessitating even higher fees, this will lower the total number of transactions, leading to further increases in fees to offset the fewer transactions etc. Which could force it into a long term store of value due to prohibitively high transaction fees. That however would also destabilize the rest of crypto market as who is going to pay $100 fee to trade for $100 worth of Alt Coins or Bittrex? I think the Concept shows so much possibility, but the business model needs work.

Enjoy the banter.. Your followed...

@pawsdog

“There will be at least 3 or 4 more bubbles”

-A. Antonopoulos

Who cares, bitcoin and cryptos are here to stay, even if CME could easily be an attack from financial institutions seeking a way to stop the phenomenon and spread delusion on bitcoin.

I will hodl for dear life and if it crashes, buy even more, crypto is the real money, fairly distributed in a decentralized network and limited in supply, not that fiat paper garbage overprinted by a centralized greedy and fraudulent authority.

It means the sheeple are waking up to the scam of the US dollar. It's pretty cool when increased awareness means increased value for those two are already awake

People are so hungry for information that articles will be churned out (and consumed by eager readers) despite the fact that they are devoid of any substance whatsoever.

Spot on.

Nobody seems to know what the hell is going on despite a daily deluge of articles.

I can't take anymore articles that mention tulip mania 🌷

Life in a nutshell, eh? Ain't got a clue about nothing. #FakeNews

Next target is $25000.

Yesterday it hits 12k in a brazilian exchange!

One more in a long line of my financial regrets.
pours a shot of whiskey while looking ruefully at a large pile of beanie babies

It means that there are people willing to buy a Bitcoin for $10000

Bitcoin will not be in a bubble until half the stores you walk into have a sign "Bitcoin accepted here"

And the thing about cryptos is that they are so easy to exchange. Once you are set up with a wallet, you are ready to accept bitcoins. Compare that to a POS (point of sales) where you will spend the better part of a month, getting the equipment, setting up bank accounts, signing forms and NDEs, getting approved by CCs.

So, crypto adoption will be slowly at first, and then all at once.

Because, if I was a salesman entrepreneur, It would take me longer to explain to each business I walked into, why they should accept bitcoin (or litecoin or dash or...) it would take me longer then it would to complete set them up.

"Bitcoin will not be in a bubble until half the stores you walk into have a sign "Bitcoin accepted here""

The reason this is not true, as @corbettreport pointed out, is that BTC may simply go away. Cryptocurrency is the actual revolution, and BTC is but the first iteration of Cryptocurrency. Just as Myspace was the first iteration of a social media platform, and Ebay the first iteration of internet sales and marketing, BTC is as likely to be replaced by another, or more likely ALL other cryptocurrencies, just as those sites were replaced by Fakebook and Amazon.

Not a hater, just pointing out a relevant truth regarding revolutionary technologies.

Steem is a far better cryptocurrency than BTC, IMHO, particularly regarding fees, and transaction speed. Not that my opinion on the matter is relevant to the market =p

Yes, it is possible that BTC could just disappear.
And the reasons are myriad. But all the reasons I know have signs, like many miners bailing. And I don't see any of those signs.

T.P.T.shouldn'tB may launch a false flag against bitcoin that seriously undermines its credibility, and sends it crashing, while regulations are piled upon it... and it will probably still come out on top.

But, I think it more likely that the signs in the window will say "Bitcoin accepted here" simply because it has name recognition. "Cryptos accepted here" just doesn't have the same meaning. And "Bitcoin accepted here" will be synonymous with most cryptos accepted here, like we talk about Kleenex®

"Steem is a far better cryptocurrency than BTC" The problem with Steem is how easily it can be obtained, this greatly reduces it value. Plus the fact it's created out of thin air.

Good point about Myspace though, can't argue with that.

Started following you in summer 2016 and in early August caught your video about bitcoin. Decided to buy some at $600. As the price walked up to $1000 I began loading my boat. Needless to say this year has been overwhelming, not only with the new found wealth but with what Satoshi's vision of a decentralized economy means for humanity. Still not convinced this is a bubble though. Could just be good old fashioned capital flight before a finance apocalypse everyone feels is coming. Any attempts to crush the price will be met by buyers thinking BTC's on sale.

Anyway, and I'm sure you've been getting this a lot lately, thank you, James.

Definitely a different perspective than most I have read. How refreshing!

If one can trust that he can own property permanently at all in this maritime system, the smartest thing for crypto investors to my mind would be to use the fiat dollars generated from exchanging your crypto-profits, and investing it in your own patch of land and off-the-grid technologies ASAP.

I find, sitting on your land would be way better than sitting on fiat money - no matter the type, crypto or FED.

They could still come and take that land away from you, but there you could at least defend yourself against it (especially with a strong community), and not simply be at the whim of speculative markets and financial cartels.

But what do I know?!

Watch for a sea-change from bitcoin to altcoins once futures launch:
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@xsid/time-for-altcoins-to-shine

I think there is no Problem with bitcoin but with the whole cryptomarket. I dont think that the whole market cap can rise forever, but bitcoin will, hopefully.

The true ramifications to the global society from the cryptocurrency revolution have not even scratched the surface. When it comes to Bitcoin, whether it remains the top dog in the long run, as far as market capitalization goes, doesn't really matter. Whether it becomes the most widely used cryptocurrency or crashes and burns doesn't matter either. But the one thing you can say about Bitcoin is that it started the cryptocurrency revolution, and it is here for good!

To the death of fiat money! Cheers!

We are in the 'hype' fase now. Every day people realize that crypto currency isn't some simple internet scam. Creating more demand.

And with the supply drying up, it's logical for the price to increase.

This is what i think.

Nice very niec post

I knew it that it is gonna raise again. Great post, thank you for sharing :)

It means.
straight way....
Banks are falling.
Crypto currencies are rising.
Bitcoin is the boss.✌✌

believe me ... he will fall again to 5000 dollars

I think there will be a future for banks, but only a small future. I also think that this might be the a step towards a world currency of sorts. This is still so young and very interesting for a direction. There are coins for almost everything now. Just look at this site you get coins for comments and posts, very interesting indeed.

nyc post
follow and upvoted mine posts work as a friendz and team . i will do the same

What if the Dollar, the Euro and all the other fiat-currencys are gone? How much satoshis costs a bread, milk, potatoes or rice, that's more important questions. Not the cryptos are rising, the fiats are falling. If we know how much satoshis we have to pay for potatoes, then we know how much a satoshi is worth.

good post!
don't hesitate to follow and upvote my posts if you like the world of cryptocurrencies.

I think it was a good post and many good comments.

I am not in the least way worried about a centralization of bitcoin. No amount of gas-lighting from the bankers will change their inevitable demise. They are dinosaurs braying at the incoming meteor. Nor am I worried about bitcoin being supplanted. It's a miracle that bitcoin managed to survive until now and I just don't see that consensus magic being replicated again on a scale that would unseat btc. Useful alts (like steem) will earn their place in the market and the whole thing will grow like a rising tide. Sooner or later the bankers will realize it's time for them to find honest work.

Amazing post. I think Bitcoin is great!

"Crypto Carnage Continues As The Fed Warns Digital Currencies Could 'Pose Serious Financial Stability Issues.'"

Financial Stability Issues? Fed, governments and all these status quo people wants to keep the social division as it is and Bitcoin is simply the change-maker blowing up the social pyramid as it happens. I love it all. Even when we see the Giant Comex who cynically, often sarcastically manipulates the market wanting to impose control over Bitcoin, it is all like the David and Goliath Tale, I love it. In the end the market is controlled by the people who buy and sell orders and to me it is amazing the number of people getting into the Bitcoin market as it indirectly supports the altcoins. Whatever happens to Bitcoin, it already show us the possibilities that lies within the tech-digital realm. Salute Satoshi Nakamoto!

I like how "sober" and objective this sounds @corbettreport. There are some forces that can never be stopped. Very interesting times to be alive.

I believe it that next year bitcoin will be quickly increase.Day by day it will be increase and i think it clap 20k $. So,bitcoin is the best online currency.

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2017 was amazing . We will see what happens to bitcoin in 2018..

Great work, very insightful Article. Thank you for sharing. One of the implications goes beyond people getting rich overnight. It's like the Internet around the nineties. It's a total game changer. Now governments (Like Dubai) are working on their own crypto, and that's the point here: a new area brought to us by the Blockchain.

I believe that the price will stay consistent around $10,000... it doesn't seem logical at all that it would go any amount higher... or at least to this extreme. Anyone who would believe that it'd hit $50,000 is clearly delusional. Still an amazing point for concurrency in general.

@corbettreport It's a huge accomplishment.

Have you seen this news about Bitcoin power?

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@wiseagent/bitcoin-the-sixth-most-powerful-currency

It seems that people are over reacting at a great oppurtunity that they are not taking. Bitcoin will eventually unforunately die down however not for a long time. Like all currencies it has it's weaknesses and pros. The goverment agencies seem to have a problem with the annoymous factor of the currency what does everyone else think?

People are carelessly buying bitcoin without even knowing anything about it. They will soon regret when they find out how expensive bitcoin transactions are compared to bitcoin alternatives.

Everything can never always go up but the game is changing. Crypto will be more important in the years to come. I can see the potential rise clearly. Anyone on earth can mine coins or stake them if they own them. 3rd world countries with cheap electricity mining bitcoin is making their people richer. 1st world countries are investing into buying the bitcoins raising demand and prices. This continues with all altcoins. The way we do transactions will never be the same.

all coin continue rise.... No one can stop cryto currency.

I don't know which way the price is going to go in the short term, but there are two things I am sure of; Bitcoin serves mostly as a store of value at present time because the price is too volatile, the current technology lacks sufficient capacity for heavy use, and transactions are both slow and expensive.

That sounds negative, and it is, but more and more people are starting to realize the promise of crypto currency. But the $10k price has received a lot of mainstream attention and this will attract a flood of new people trying to use the tech, and frankly, the UI for Bitcoin is not ready for prime time. No crypto platform has figured out how to make using crypto easy and secure. That is a my short term concern... people will try it out and say WTF?

We didn't have to convince people to switch from cassette to CD to MP3... it happened because the new technology was a vast improvement over the previous formats. This will happen with crypto too... old monetary systems will be a thing of the past, so long term... Bitcoin all the way up!

muzakirpb upvote, posting is perfect

muzakirpb upvote, posting is perfect

Great post!

There are still so many people who know absolutely nothing about bitcoin and cryptocurrency. A friend of mine told me the other day that she was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy and bitcoin was brought up in the episode. She had no idea what bitcoin was all about and she had to go ahead and look it up after seeing the episode.

Cryptocurrency is quickly becoming more mainstream, but it still has a long way to go! So many people are still in the dark, and until that changes I have a feeling the markets will continue to be extremely volatile.

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