$8 Million: ‘Crypto Genius’ Reveals His Craziest Bitcoin Prediction Yet
'Crypto genius' James Altucher predicts that the Bitcoin price could one day hit $8 million. Luckily, celebrities rarely get called out on their crazy bets. | Source: Shutterstock (i), Reason TV/YouTube (ii). Image Edited by CCN.com.
By CCN.com: A quick way to crypto fame is to use whatever influence you have and make an insane call about the future Bitcoin price. You don’t have to be right. You can be consistently wrong. But if you’re bullish and the market starts to move, people will listen to you.
Crypto Celebrities Keep Saying the Craziest Things
James Altucher has been preaching what he knows about money since long before the Bitcoin gold rush of 2017, in which mainstream celebrities tried to get crypto rich and pumped the price. The semi-viral financial star is joining the $1 million club, claiming that Bitcoin has a chance to pump to that price eventually. He says it can go beyond that if mass adoption takes off, to more like $8 million .
“How much paper currency is out there…it’s about $200 hundred trillion dollars out in the world, and there is only about $200 billion dollars of crypto currency, so that is 100,000 percent from here. So that could give bitcoin a price of $8 million dollars, so $1 million dollars is even a discount to where bitcoin could eventually go. When it gets there, who knows,” Altucher said.
The class of 2017 firmly expected another gold rush past $20,000, which will relieve a lot of people who feel they’re “involuntarily” holding large bags.
Altucher isn’t the only one to claim Bitcoin’s headed north of $1 million. A former IBM blockchain chief was saying the same thing. Other people like John McAfee believe it can go that high. Then there’s that kid, Erik Finman.
One thing is certain. Lightning Network will need to become the norm as regular interest takes hold in Bitcoin. Payment channel providers will need to find a way to service the majority of companies that are using on-chain transactions now and provide them with the ability to use Lightning instead. It’s probably silly to expect the mass of users to create their own nodes for payments, but several larger services will hopefully emerge that reliably help people push transactions through.
Don’t Talk about a $1 Million Bitcoin Price Until Lightning Adoption Truly Takes Off
Similarly, Bitcoin wallet services need to integrate more with Lightning Network. If this is how the network is to be scaled, mass adoption means that most users need to have the option to try the service out quickly. New wallets shouldn’t be required – existing wallets should integrate the services as quickly as possible.
The result would be as many people using Lightning Network as possible. In this scenario, the hope would be that most people were using Bitcoin’s “second layer” quickly and cheaply.
Other second layer solutions may emerge which offer similar speed and cost efficiency. The only concern is whether newcomers will latch onto these solutions or use whatever’s available to them. In either case, a broader base of companies and providers integrating Bitcoin’s scaling solutions will lead to a better scenario for mass adoption.
If we assume this will naturally evolve through the market dominance (and cost) of Lightning Network, then, either way we look at it, most Bitcoin transactions should and will be taking place through the second layer protocol.
It won’t matter until the vast majority of services, exchanges, and wallets are using Lightning Network.
Once that happens, users will see real benefits. Until then, it’s just one exotic option in a sea of them, and Altucher’s $8 million Bitcoin price prediction is just the craziest call from a circus of crypto celebrities.
