Vinny Lingham is the CEO of identity startup Civic, and the former founder of mobile gift card platform Gyft.
In this opinion, Lingham explains why he believes the price of bitcoin is headed higher, even if this won’t be the direct result of the network’s reward halving this year. The post is a follow-up to his widely circulated opposing prediction, issued in 2014. After reading my post Finding Equilibrium , published in March 2014, one could argue that I was a bit bearish on bitcoin – believing that it would trade sideways and down until certain fundamentals were in place.
At that point, most people inside the community expected bitcoin to retest its previous high of $1,255 in 2013 and easily break $2,000. In fact, when I surveyed the audience at CoinSummit in 2014, barely anyone would take the contrarian view. I did, and this was coming from the same person who correctly predicted that bitcoin would hit $1,000 just the year before.
To summarize my previous post, I argued the following: A lack of trust in exchanges would limit bitcoin purchasing
Bitcoin is not a currency, but a commodity (it has since been declared as such by numerous bodies, including the CFTC)
Loss of momentum (Bitcoin was on the way down, not up)
Mainstream consumer adoption was lagging (and it still is to a large extent)
Merchant adoption was outpacing consumer demand Miner margins were being squeezed (forcing more coins to be sold) " Smart Contracts " would be a particularly important use case for the bitcoin network. How 25 months makes a difference in the world of technology!If we examine the points above, the following changes are clearly visible: Bitcoin is on the way up, creating upward price momentum Merchant adoption has slowed (as a percentage) and consumers […]
