Prescient Investor Predicts Stability and Bitcoin Price Back at $20,000

No need to hit the panic button. Ran Neu-Ner, a South African investor who was savvy enough to invest in his first bitcoin half a decade ago, said the recent volatility in the bitcoin price is nothing new and in fact, bitcoin is headed to $20,000 in 2018. He made the remarks to CNBC, where he also suggested that things could get worse before they get better, pointing to a floor for the bitcoin price of about $8,000 but probably not below $7,500, pointing to “retail money” that’s poured in.

“We’ve seen bitcoin go up, and we’ve seen bitcoin go down. We’ve seen it go down 50% at a time. But it’s quite a resilient currency/commodity/asset that just keeps going up afterward,” said Neu-Ner.

He reminded the host about his previous visit a couple of months ago when bitcoin was trading below $8,000 only to spike to nearly $20,000 shortly thereafter.

Despite his bullish call on bitcoin, Neu-Ner’s money is on Ethereum, which he says is run by “the smartest people in the world,” in reference to the developers who he recently got to know at a conference held in Cancun.

He touts Ethereum for its multiple use cases, ranging from hedging to betting, to voting, for instance, all on the Ethereum network. Meanwhile, bitcoin’s use cases are twofold — as a currency or a store of value, the latter of which is how Neu-Ner views the cryptocurrency, referencing it as “digital gold.”

Meanwhile, he points out it’s only been about a year that cryptocurrencies have become accessible to the retail investor, and they’ve not even attained wide-scale adoption yet. “2018 is the year where the mechanisms to allow retail consumers to get into cryptocurrencies start to open themselves up,” he said, adding that it will stabilize the price.

Neu-Ner vs. Roubini: Biggest Bubble Ever?
American economist and chairman of Roubini Macro Associates, Nouriel Roubini, on the other hand, believes bitcoin is the “biggest bubble in human history,” one that he told Bloomberg “is finally crashing.” If he’s right, the bitcoin bubble must be greater even than US housing bubble that he forecasted in 2006, two years prior to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. That prediction won him accolades and the nickname Dr. Doom, which he apparently is still making use of today. An avid user of Twitter, Roubini often tweets about bitcoin, mostly documenting as he says, ‘the mother of all crypto bubbles go bust.”

If bitcoin is the biggest bubble in human history, it must surpass even the stock market crash of 1929, when investors lost $25 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions in today’s dollars compared to bitcoin’s present market cap of $150 billion. The Crisis Economics author also likes bitcoin to the internet bubble, tulip mania of the 1600’s and London’s South Sea bubble in the 1700’s — all of which Roubini says bitcoin surpasses for a bursting bubble.

On the other side from John Mcafee

Bitcoin at $1 Million by 2020: McAfee Doubles Down on Bullish Bet

John McAfee, whose fame exists rather heavily due to the software company he founded in the late 1980s, took to Twitter yet again on February 2, 2018, to reaffirm that he was indeed bullish on bitcoin. In an attempt to predict bitcoin’s price at the end of this decade, McAfee had previously stated that it would reach “$500,000 by the end of 2020”. In November 2017, he tweeted that the cryptocurrency had accelerated much faster than expected, causing him to raise his prediction to $1 million instead.

McAfee’s bitcoin prediction is not all that he has stated in his tweets though. He has claimed that if bitcoin does not reach his price target by the end of 2020, he will proceed to “eat his d**k on national television.” While it is obviously near impossible that any televised network will allow such a demonstration on air, McAfee is perhaps trying to instill greater confidence in his prediction. That said, most people, including some diehard cryptocurrency enthusiasts, have derided his bold claims.

According to McAfee, his “prediction model” had only forecast bitcoin reaching $5000 by the end of 2017. The reality, however, panned out to be quite deviant from his model, with the digital currency finding itself at an all-time high peak of close to $20,000 in December 2017. Bitcoin, along with the entire cryptocurrency market, has been on a steady decline since reaching that peak, with the cumulative market cap at least 40% lower than what it was a month ago, at least as of the time of writing this article two months later. Naturally, this has prompted people to question McAfee’s prophecy for the future. If bitcoin were to hit $1 million by 2020, it would have to appreciate a hundred times from its current valuation.

John McAfee recently ended his role as the chief cybersecurity visionary at MGT Capital Investments. The company not only has a significant stake in hydro-powered bitcoin mining, but has also been working with blockchain technology to develop security-related products.

Interestingly, McAfee has been a rather strong proponent of the bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Cash (BCH). He even alluded to the two cryptocurrencies potentially battling it out for the top position sometime in the future. Most Bitcoin Cash supporters believe that the original bitcoin is too bloated and unusable as a currency or substitute for cash, thus necessitating the fork. McAfee not only believes that BCH is a possible cash-based payment system, but also that it may dethrone bitcoin as the de facto cryptocurrency. That said, his BCH vision surprisingly does not jeopardize the one in which bitcoin reaches $1 million within the next couple of years.

It remains to be seen whether bitcoin will once again retrace its steps back to the all-time high established back in December 2017. While past performance is no indicator of the future, it is very likely that the entire digital currency market will recover sooner or later as it always has. Once that happens though, one can only speculate whether McAfee’s audacious price target is attainable or not.

Still On Cryptocurrency This time Litecoin:
Litecoin to Complement Bitcoin as Payments Currency: Founder Charlie Lee

Cryptocurrency-fueled scams seem to keep Litecoin founder Charlie Lee up at night, based on a report in Business Insider. Lee, who is an alum of both Google and Coinbase, spoke about the speculative nature of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investing, saying that it’s not “bad” but instead a “natural progression,” adding that he sees nothing wrong with it.

But Lee, who himself has had to fight off rumors of manipulating the price of Litecoin, pointed to pervasive scams in which participants are just in it for a quick buck. Lee is quoted as saying:

“It’s quite easy for a founder to pump a coin and make it seem like it’s the latest and greatest and it will cure world hunger, and the price can go up to $10 billion. And it’s easy for whoever did that to cash out.”

As a result, people will lose money, he warned, which saddens him. Lee also pointed to the rush of ICOs, many of which are behind white papers comprised of fancy tech jargon, promising the world and raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. “These coins will likely just go to zero,” he said.

Fellow blockchain veteran Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum recently pointed to the social good that is inherent in the genesis of blockchain and what the “crypto community” should be focused on. Like Buterin, Lee would like to see a shift in the focus to technology and advancing the industry.

Lee in December sold his entire Litecoin portfolio, with the exception of a handful of “collectibles,” to prevent what he said could be construed as a “conflict of interest.”

Blockchain Pioneers Echo the Sentiment
Lee is not the first cryptocurrency pioneer to call out the rise of scams in the space, including upcoming ICOs. Ethereum’s Buterin has similarly railed against the unscrupulous activity, most recently lauding the efforts of one Reddit user for publicly questioning an upcoming ICO’s claims of having a Buterin association, in response to which Buterin tweeted: “This is exactly the correct way to react to an ICO claiming my involvement.”

Meanwhile, Fellow Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin echoed those sentiments, having recently told CNBC that many upcoming ICOs that fit the bill as “copycat” projects, with no intentions of providing value to investors. Ripple chief Brad Garlinghouse went so far as to say that much of what’s unfolding among ICOs is fraud.

Litecoin & Bitcoin
Meanwhile, fraud wasn’t the only topic of discussion highlighted in the Business Insider article. Lee created Litecoin in 2011 in many ways to improve upon bitcoin, with a focus on greater scalability and speed. Litecoin, however, appears to be more a rival to XRP than it is to bitcoin.

“So my vision for litecoin has always been to complement bitcoin — to be the payments currency. Where bitcoin would be digital gold, litecoin would be silver. It’s more useful for payments. And bitcoin would be better for store of value,” he said.

He goes on to point out, however, that Litecoin is 4x faster than bitcoin for transactions. But thanks to a different POW algorithm, cryptocurrency miners can’t mine both coins, which removes a facet of the competition.

He points to the Lightning Network as the underlying technology that will advance the payments sector, adding that it’s not a panacea and won’t combat high fees tied to bitcoin. “So litecoin I think can find its own niche to help address payment fees,” said Lee.

Litecoin, the No. 6 cryptocurrency based on market cap, at $9.6 billion, is off by a double-digit percentage today alongside all of the top 10 digital coins. Litecoin has advanced 650% since about July and is one of only a handful of cryptocurrencies that trade at Lee’s former employer Coinbase.

News Sourced on https://ccn.com