Bitcoin Displacing Gold Entirely Would Value BTC At $350,000 –  Is It Possible?

Since its birth, Bitcoin (BTC) has been lauded as an alternative to traditional assets day in and day out. Most notably, the cryptocurrency is. in the eyes of some pundits, a replacement to gold, specifically the metal’s store of value capabilities. But if Bitcoin takes over gold’s hegemony, what would happen to the value of BTC?Related Reading: Bitcoin (BTC) Best Performing Major Asset in 2019, Surges 43% Year-to-DateThe Case For A Six-Figure BitcoinAccording to HodlWhale, a Seattle-based cryptocurrency investor, a world where Bitcoin has absorbed all the value of the gold in circulation would see BTC valued at $350,000.If #Bitcoin were to displace the value of gold the current value of a single Bitcoin would be $350K. Bitcoin has the ability to displace value across many financial and technology markets. $BTC is greater than #Gold #BTC350K— HodlWhale (@HodlWhale) April 19, 2019

This figure isn’t exactly baseless. As reported by NewsBTC on an earlier date, all gold in circulation is currently valued at approximately $7.83 trillion, while all BTC has a mere $94 billion valuation. If the latter was to fully displace the value of the first, Crypto Voices, an industry analytics and research group, estimated that BTC would swell to a value of $450,000 — slightly above HodlWhale’s estimate.And while this sounds absurd, especially considering that cryptocurrencies remain in the depths of a brutal bear market, some are sure that Bitcoin will become the “digital gold” that its investors want it to be.Could BTC Displace Gold? Mere days ago, Adamant Capital, a Bitcoin-centric fund led by long-time investor Tuur Demeester, released a report on the crypto market’s current status. Following an explanation that “whales” are accumulating cryptocurrencies en-masse, the market is expressing “hope,” and that a further drawdown could be possible if conditions are right, Adamant’s partners explained that they expect for Bitcoin to disrupt traditional assets, like stores of value and reserve assets.Our new report “Bitcoin in Heavy Accumulation” is out. Read here: https://t.co/DkjedcF3RG pic.twitter.com/UpQotZUTdW— Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) April 18, 2019

The firm specifically looks to the growth of Bitcoin scaling, like the Lightning Network’s staggering growth and the rise of sidechains; the institutionalization/financialization of this industry through Bakkt, Nasdaq’s futures, etc., and the rise of the millennial demographic to claim that BTC could become a “globally used digital gold and reserve asset.” But why exactly should BTC usurp gold?Well, it’s simple, to be frank.As Gemini’s Tyler Winklevoss explained, Bitcoin is “better at being gold than gold itself” — a sentiment held by many long-standing cryptocurrency investors. He specifically looks to the fact that BTC is portable, sculpted for today’s digital society, even scarcer than the metal, censorship-resistant unlike traditional assets, and decentralized as a way to back this cheery sentiment. At one point, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur added that the only thing that gold has over BTC is a “3,000-year headstart.”Featured Image from Shutterstock

Published 40 mins ago on 20/04/2019 By NewsBTC.com

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Price Watch – BTC Primed For Lift-off To $5,500

• Bitcoin price remained well supported above the $5,200 and $5,160 levels against the US Dollar.

• The price is slowly grinding higher and it may well climb above the $5,350 level.

• There is a major ascending channel in place with support at $5,210 on the hourly chart of the BTC/USD pair (data feed from Kraken).

• The pair is trading nicely in an uptrend and it could continue to climb towards $5,400 and $5,500.

Bitcoin price remained well supported on the downside above $5,200 against the US Dollar. BTC is trading nicely in an uptrend and it seems like the bulls are aiming $5,400 or even $5,500.

Bitcoin Price Analysis

In the past three days, we saw a slow and steady rise above $5,100 in bitcoin price against the US Dollar. The BTC/USD pair broke the key $5,160 and $5,200 resistance levels to settle in a positive zone. There was even a close above the $5,200 level and the 100 hourly simple moving average. Intermediately, there were a few swing moves and downside corrections, but the price remained well bid above the $5,160 level. The last swing low was near at $5,192 before the price climbed above the $5,300 level.

The price traded as high as $5,364 recently and corrected lower. It broke the $5,280 level and the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent wave from the $5,192 low to $5,364 high. However, the decline was protected near the $5,250 support and the price remained well above the 100 hourly simple moving average. The 61.8% Fib retracement level of the recent wave from the $5,192 low to $5,364 high also acted as a strong support. More importantly, there is a major ascending channel in place with support at $5,210 on the hourly chart of the BTC/USD pair.

Therefore, dips towards the $5,220 and $5,200 levels remains well supported in the short term. On the upside, an initial resistance is near the $5,350 and $5,360 levels. A successful break above the $5,364 swing high is likely to open the doors for more gains above the $5,400 and $5,450 levels.

Looking at the chart, bitcoin price is clearly trading in a solid uptrend above the $5,200 support area. The bulls remain in action and there are chances of an upside break above the $5,400 resistance. On the downside, only a close below the green area at $5,160 could set the pace for more losses.

Technical indicators:

Hourly MACD – The MACD is currently placed nicely in the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for BTC/USD is currently correcting lower towards the 50 level.

Major Support Levels – $5,200 followed by $5,160.

Major Resistance Levels – $5,360, $5,400 and $5,500.

AAYUSH JINDAL | APRIL 20, 2019 | 4:08 AM

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Undervalued Bitcoin Will Be a Multi-Trillion Dollar Asset Class, Says Analyst

By CCN: Bitcoins gains may not be parabolic, but the price is moving steadily higher. With BTC currently hovering at the $5,300 level, the mood around crypto has improved tremendously. Nonetheless, the bitcoin price continues to trade 75% below its peak.

A new report by Adamant Capital suggests that the smart money represented by BTC whales is in an accumulation phase. This chapter reflects the last phase of the bear market. The firm, which runs a bitcoin alpha fund, is advising value investors that nows the time to buy. Once the BTC bulls solidify their grip, the bitcoin price is headed for the moon, the analysis suggests:

During this accumulation phase, we expect for bitcoin to trade in a range of $3,000 to $6,500 until the new bull market permanently cements the denarian cryptocurrency as a mult-trillion dollar asset class.

Here it is, as promised! https://t.co/uGbpqYs5s8

— Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) April 18, 2019

Big Investors Got Cold Feet in 2018

The crypto market is headed to the big time where it will go toe-to-toe with assets in the capital markets. So, how do you explain last year? When the price cratered below $6,000, BTC hodlers got spooked and sold. Adamant Capital points to more than 70,000 bitcoin days [being] destroyed. Conditions worsened when crypto exchange Coinbase redirected some of its BTC. This activity combined gave institutional investors cold feet at year-end 2018. What a difference a new year makes, and the institutions have begun to dip their toes back into the crypto waters.

historic data bitcoin is in an accumulation phase. | Source: Adamant Capital

Based on the historic highs and lows of bitcoin…we are back in undervalued territory. That doesnt mean the bitcoin price wont retest November lows, but the dynamics are shifting. They point to low volatility, which is a surefire sign that the trigger-happy retail speculators are out and agnostic traders and long-term value investors are in.

Accumulation Phase

So if bitcoin is back in strong hands, why arent we seeing the price spike? The accumulation phase reflects a time when value investors buy the dips. Turns out they are in no hurry to do so. They will continue accumulating BTC throughout this phase however long it takes. That explains why the market will be range-bound for a while.

The thing to remember is that leading cryptocurrencys fundamentals remain solid, and the ecosystem is developing at a rapid clip. If theyre right, the bitcoin bulls are just warming up.

1 hour ago via CCN

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Crypto Assets Surge 16.23% in Q1 With Gains for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, EOS: CoinGecko Report

CoinGecko’s 48-page report gives an overview of the cryptoasset market in Q1. In the first quarter of 2019, total network value of all cryptoassets was up 16.23%.

Among the top five coins, most saw a positive increase in price with Litecoin and EOS seeing the best returns of 103% and 66% respectively. Bitcoin and Ethereum saw modest growth of 11% and 8% while XRP saw its price decline by 11%.

This quarter saw Ethereum claiming back its position as the second most valuable cryptoasset by network value. There were three new entrants to the top 30 list – Cosmos (ATOM), Basic Attention Token (BAT) and Crypto.com Chain (CRO).

Exchange-based tokens saw strong growth with OKEx’s OKB token and Binance Coin (BNB) being the largest gainers, gaining six and five places respectively. With the increase, Binance Coin (BNB) is now in the top 10 list ending the quarter in eighth position.

CoinGecko took a deep-dive into three major events that took place in January, February, and March for this quarter’s report.

January saw the launch of two new coins, Grin and Beam, which make use of a new privacy protocol called MimbleWimble. The launch of both these coins was highly anticipated as it represents a fundamental improvement to blockchain privacy and scalability.

Initial exchange offering (IEO) became a major topic of discussion for February. The IEO became popular after the wildly successful token sale of the BitTorrent (BTT) on Binance Launchpad. The successful BitTorrent IEO made other exchanges take notice and rush to start their respective IEOs.

That being said, it remains to be seen if the IEO trend can sustain. Looking at the return of the three Binance Launchpad IEOs in February, one can see that returns have been decreasing and that purchasers have been dumping the tokens immediately after they were listed on the market for trading.

March saw the launch of Cosmos (ATOM), a project that aims to solve blockchain interoperability, and CoinGecko spent some time going through the details of Cosmos in this report.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin (BTC) price of $1M justified by basic mathematics – John McAfee

• BTC/USD is recovering within the current range.

• John McAfee cites basic mathematical formulas to support hist BTC forecast.

BTC/USD recovered from the recent low of $4,948 to trade at the $5,225 level at the time of writing. BTC/USD has gained 3.5% on a day-on-day basis and mostly unchanged since the beginning of Wednesday moving within the recent upside channel.

What’s going on?

Meanwhile, a prominent figure in the crypto industry and a famous cybersecurity expert John McAfee believes that the Bitcoin price of at least $1 million is justified by mathematical formulas. He also pointed out that behavioral economics of digital currency was totally different from that one of traditional financial markets, which means we cannot extrapolate stock market paradigms to predict Bitcoin price movements.

“Come on people!!! It’s time to brush up your basic math skills and run some f*^#$ng numbers!!!! It is mathematically impossible for Bitcoin to be less than $1 mil by the end of 2020. Bitcoin is not an effing stock!!! You can’t apply stock paradigms or formulas and expect answers,” he wrote in his Twitter account.

Bitcoin’s technical picture

From the intraday point of view, BTC/USD moved above SMA50 4-hour (currently at $5.135). This handle now serves as an initial support area. once it is cleared, the sell-off may gain traction with the next focus on a strong psychological barrier $5,000 underpinned by the lower boundary of the above-mentioned upside channel and SMA100 (4-hour).

On the upside, we will need to see a move above $5,360. It is created by 23.6% Fibo retracement weekly and 161.8% Fibo projection daily and followed by the recent high at $5,448.

BTC/USD, 4H chart

Tanya Abrosimova

FXStreet

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin will be over $1 million in 7-10 years according to Paypal director

• Paypal director and Xapo CEO, Wences Casares, believes that not investing in Bitcoin should be considered “irresponsible.”

• He also wrote that 1% of a portfolio should be dedicated to crypto as the “risk of losing this investment is high.”

Paypal director and Xapo CEO, Wences Casares, predicted that Bitcoin (BTC) will be over $1 million in 7-10 years. In an essay titled “The case for a small allocation to Bitcoin,” he wrote that it would be irresponsible for investors not to have any exposure to Bitcoin at all. He wrote:

“Bitcoin is a fascinating experiment but it is still just that: an experiment. As such it still has a chance of failing and becoming worthless. In my (subjective) opinion the chances of Bitcoin failing are at least 20%. But after 10 years of working well without interruption, with more than 60 million holders, adding more than 1 million new holders per month and moving more than $1 billion per day worldwide, it has a good chance of succeeding. In my (subjective) opinion those chances of succeeding are at least 50%. If Bitcoin does succeed, 1 Bitcoin may be worth more than $1 million in 7 to 10 years. That is 250 times what it is worth today (at the time of writing the price of Bitcoin is ~ $4,000).”

As to how much of one’s portfolio should be dedicated to Bitcoin, Casares said:

“I suggest that a $10 million portfolio should invest at most $100,000 in Bitcoin (up to 1% but not more as the risk of losing this investment is high). If Bitcoin fails, this portfolio will lose at most $100,000 or 1% of its value over 3 to 5 years, which most portfolios can bear. But if Bitcoin succeeds, in 7 to 10 years those $100,000 may be worth more than $25 million, more than twice the value of the entire initial portfolio.”

Rajarshi Mitra

FXStreet

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

The Bigger Picture Behind Bitcoin’s Latest Price Rebound

OPINION

Bitcoin’s out-of-the-blue bounce over the $5,000 mark this month has prompted some predictable pontificating from price-obsessed people within and outside the cryptocurrency community.

Investors who are long-cryptocurrencies have gleefully pronounced that the Crypto Winter, which began when bitcoin’s bubble burst at the end of 2017, is now mercifully over. The most optimistic are forecasting a rerun of bitcoin’s fall 2015 bounce from its prior post-bubble collapse, which sent it not only back above its 2013 high of $1,150 but all the way to a December 2017 peak of $19,500.

At the same time, bitcoin skeptics have pointed to the seeming lack of fundamental news behind the price rise and declared it meaningless. Typical of the genre, Matt Novak at Gizmodo penned an angry screed titled “Bitcoin Surges 15% Overnight Because Nobody Learned Their Lesson After the Last Crash.”

One of Novak’s insights: “To be clear, bitcoin is absolutely worthless by any real measure. It’s fake money that’s about as practical to use in the real world as Monopoly bills.”

Readers won’t be surprised to hear that I disagree with Novak’s simplistic rant. But I’m also turned off by the knee-jerk cheerleading from crypto traders whenever bitcoin’s price bounces.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with reducing the measure of bitcoin’s worldwide importance to a price metric that’s denominated in a fiat currency that its advocates hope to replace. It pushes the debate into an inane all-or-nothing binary set of predictions: bitcoin is either going to zero or “to the moon.”

What matters is that 10 years after an unidentified software engineer created it, this decentralized system for recording sequences of transactions continues to do its job, block after block, with no authority in charge, no user able to alter past transactions, and no person or entity able to shut it down.

The more this goes on, the more it reinforces the powerful vision behind bitcoin: a peer-to-peer, disintermediated system for exchanging value around the world. And in that context, we can also think of bitcoin the cryptocurrency – differentiated from bitcoin the system – as a unique, provably scare digital asset that expresses the overall value in that vast potential.

Bitcoin is valuable because it exists

A point that’s lost on critics like Novak is that the longer bitcoin simply survives – in the face of the $90 billion valuation that stands as a de facto bounty for hackers to try to take it down, compromise its security or corrupt it – the more its overall value is confirmed.

Bitcoin is progressively proving itself to be an unstoppable, digital system of global exchange, one that functions outside of the traditional national government-mandated system of currency and banking. That status is what gives bitcoin its value.

Of course, the global impact of the bitcoin value exchange system, and therefore its worth to humanity, will be significantly enhanced if adoption advances to a much wider scale and it is used frequently in the world’s transactions. And, yes, a great deal of development work is still needed if it is to ever reach that point.

(Some recent technological leaps such as the Lightning Network and the emergence of decentralized, non-custodial asset exchange technologies offer hope that this scaling challenge can be achieved, though nothing is guaranteed.)

However, widespread adoption in payments is not necessary for bitcoin to have value. To understand why that’s the case, it’s useful to think about gold, to which bitcoin is often compared.

The power of common belief

Similar to bitcoin, gold is a mutually agreed store of value that, for all intents and purposes, lies outside the control of nation-state governments and banks. It’s not widely used as a day-to-day currency, but it does enjoy a widespread, shared belief in its value.

Where does gold’s value come from? The answer is somewhat tautological: it comes from that same widely held belief, from a shared understanding in gold’s capacity to function as a depoliticized global system of exchange that’s free of manipulation. Sure, we tend to think of gold in terms of its material qualities: that it’s durable and that it’s shiny in a way that connotes beauty. But its lasting worth really derives from the more esoteric notion that human beings have for a long time deeply held a shared belief in its value.

That belief has turned gold into a system for protecting property, a system used through the centuries by refugees, dissidents and investors for moving and storing value and for hedging against lost spending power. That we now have a digital version of this concept, one that’s designed for the borderless, internet-shaped world of the 21st century, is a big deal.

When dealing with debates over bitcoin’s value, it’s also worth going a little way down the rabbit hole of thinking about what money actually is. Not everyone agrees on a definition, but I think it’s useful to think of money as a societally agreed system for storing and exchanging value. The system has to have certain properties for people to reach this agreement – it must fungible, durable, transferable, divisible, etc. – but it’s the agreement itself that gives it its value.

Here, too, is where many of bitcoin’s detractors get lost.

Fixating on the misplaced idea of money as a thing, they exclaim that bitcoin can’t have any value as it isn’t backed by anything. This, of course, also misses the fact that it is backed by the energy and other resources that miners spend to do the computational work needed to secure the bitcoin ledger.

But the bigger point is that bitcoin’s value, as with all forms of money, comes from the existence of a wide agreement in its potential use as a store of value and medium of exchange.

In bitcoin’s case, the agreement is arguably one that involves 35 million people, if Cambridge University’s latest survey of authenticated users is to be believed. This large level of participation is essentially why bitcoin holds a much greater value than the altcoins that are forks of its code.

So, this is why bitcoin at $5,000 is important, not because it’s a sign of that new investors are coming to push up its price again, but because it validates the core proposition of bitcoin’s resilience and promise.

Michael J Casey

Apr 15, 2019 at 04:00 UTC

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member