Bitcoin (BTC) continues to consolidate at around $10,850 on June 24 after a new rally took it over $11,000 for the first time in 2019. The price of the numero uno cryptocurrency by the way of market cap is unlikely to breach $40,000 this year, according to Trace Mayer, the host of Bitcoin Knowledge podcast. Notably, Google search about Bitcoin has hit its monthly peak today.
At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin is trading at 10,867, down 1.8% from prior close, indicating a minor correction after a weeklong rally. On Sunday, BTC/USD hit a high of $11,123, the highest since March 2018. Main stream media who had written off the coin finds it hard to explain the strong rally.
Still, Whitney Tilson, founder of Empire Financial Research and former hedge-fund manager has stated that it is simply a dead-cat bounce and investors must not get fooled by seeing the sharp uptrend. While speaking to Bloomberg, Tilson said “Mark my words: A year from now, it will be a lot lower. This is a techno-libertarian pump-and-dump scheme that will end in ruin.”
Even though Bitcoin is losing ground presently, it is still comfortably trading with a weekly gain of over 20% and monthly gain of about 35%. Other altcoins, barring Ethereum (ETH), was unable to post similar gains. In fact, in the past 24 hours, top altcoins are trading with a loss of 2% to 4%.
Ethereum (ETH), the blockchain facilitating deployment of smart contracts, fell 3% to trade at $306. Likewise Ripple (XRP) lost 5% to trade at a little higher than $0.45. Tron (TRX) was one of the prominent winners with over 3% gains mainly due to the stablecoin offering. More importantly, the market cap of cryptocurrency market is well over $300 billion. Bitcoin’s market dominance has reached 59%, in line with the strong rally in recent weeks.
Bitcoin advocate Mayer has predicted that the present rally points to a price of $21,000 at year-end, based on the popular price forecasting tool Mayer Multiple. That figure is considerably lower than predictions made by other crypto enthusiasts such as Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, but still stands higher than the price attained in December 2017.
Mayer Multiple is a forecasting method which involves dividing the prevailing price of Bitcoin by its 200-day moving average. The Mayer Multiple of Bitcoin is presently 2.09. Historically, the Mayer Multiple of Bitcoin had been above 2.09 only 14.79% of the time. Therefore, the probability of hitting $40,000 is quite less.
“…Very low probability of $40k in a few months,” Mayer summarized.
For the rest of 2019, the Mayer Multiple indicates possible price levels of $15,000, $21,000 and then $30,500.
Bitcoin will undergo halving of reward in June 2020. Around that time, Bitcoin is expected to breach $30,000. In fact, Google searches related to Bitcoin sharply increased after Facebook officially announced the commencement of Libra project. However, Google search related to Libra has turned flat after the white paper was published on June 18.
From a broader view, Google searches for Bitcoin continue to remain unchanged at 10% of what it had been in 2017, the year in which Bitcoin hit a record high of about $20,000. The increase in public interest has once again coincided with the recent price rise.
The top five nations which are actively contributing to the search about Bitcoin include Austria, Ghana, Switzerland, Nigeria and South Africa. For Libra, search originates mainly from Albania, Panama, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Dominican Republic.
As Google search for Bitcoin is at its monthly high, we may see FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) set in soon. That may act as further driver of price. Furthermore, active involvement of financial institutions may also push the crypto further higher.
Despite unleashing scathing criticism about Facebook’s Libra for being centralized, Joe Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and analysts at cryptocurrency exchange Binance have opined that the stable coin of the social media platform provider could result in a boost in overall trading volume in cryptocurrency sector.
