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Never Underestimate Bitcoin

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There is a general consensus in the market, and it’s not good. If you have been paying attention to Bitcoin, crypto, and financial markets in general it has been impossible to miss. Everyone is bearish and convinced that prices will be going much lower.

If you take a step back and look at the entire situation it makes sense. In regard to Bitcoin, it has been a full year of nothing but the price dropping. Going from $69k down to a low of $15k. This fact alone would be enough to cause anyone to lose all hope in the market. but it gets much worse. The macro situation around the world is looking much worse than most of us have ever experienced in our lifetimes. Inflation is rampant, people are out of work, war has broken out around the world, and people simply can’t afford the life that they were accustomed to before. We are in the middle of a worldwide recession that could become a depression. This has caused financial markets to go risk-off and caused the crypto purchasing market to dry up. And then there is the mess of self-inflicted wounds that crypto experienced throughout the year as well causing countless insolvencies.

Leading many in the Bitcoin market to not wonder when the next bull market will be, but instead, wonder if Bitcoin will ever be able to recover from this.

The truth is that prices could go lower, all it would take would be for another unexpected black swan event to appear. After all, there have been so many of them in the last few years. However, if that happens, we should all be treating it as a gift. Similar to how there are incredible sales for Black Friday, Bitcoin is going through a similar phase. If you are reading this article, that likely means you have devoted a significant amount of time learning about and researching Bitcoin. It’s likely that you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole and have great conviction in the potential that BTC has in the future. If that is the case, then these short-term price movements should have little to no effect on you. Except becoming excited to have a chance to buy Bitcoin at cheaper prices.

As I mentioned before, it seems the entire market has concluded that Bitcoin’s price will go lower. However, if there is anything that we know about Bitcoin, it is to expect the unexpected. To never underestimate Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency and the pioneer of this entire market. Something that most cryptocurrency advocates take for granted. When it was first created it had no value. It was difficult to even give it away for free. But, somehow it naturally grew in popularity and actually gained value. People became willing to give up real money to buy Bitcoin. People underestimate how big of a hurdle this was. All other cryptocurrencies can launch with values because Bitcoin was able to achieve this. Going from a value of zero to one is the most difficult thing in finance.

That was only the first hurdle that Bitcoin had to overcome in its life. The next was the threat of Bitcoin becoming illegal to use and own, potentially being banned by governments. Many people forget, but there was a time when there was a real fear that you may eventually go to prison for owning Bitcoin. The people who owned it during this time weren’t so concerned about the price of Bitcoin, but the freedom it gave them. Being able to use your debit card to easily buy crypto from exchange apps on your phone like Coinbase, Binance and more is something that many people take for granted.

Those were two amazing feats, yet people continued to underestimate Bitcoin. These skeptics claimed that Bitcoin would never be a store of value or would never see large-scale adoption. Once again, Bitcoin would prove skeptics wrong. The first sign of this was when a real publicly traded company, Microstategy, bought Bitcoin and put it on its balance sheet. People dismissed this news because it was a smaller tech company that many had never heard of. However, that all changed after Tesla would buy Bitcoin for its balance sheet. Although Tesla would later sell a portion, they do still own a large amount of BTC.

And so the narrative of companies potentially putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet became the newest form of FOMO, but everyone was surprised when El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in their country. Now Bitcoiners turned their minds much bigger. They were no longer worried about keeping up with other competing cryptocurrencies, but instead were now competing against governments. As you would expect, people dismissed the news because El Salvador’s GDP is quite low when compared to other countries. However, it was a start. Less than a year later, the Central African Republic would also make Bitcoin legal tender in its borders. The dominos of adoption are beginning to fall down, and the only question is which domino will fall next?

There will always be people who underestimate Bitcoin. They will say it is too expensive or isn’t fast enough. For this we have Lightning. They will then continue complaining that you can’t have real smart contracts or DeFi on Bitcoin. For this, we’ll show them TARO on Lightning in the future. The fact is that Bitcoin moves at its own pace and is playing a much different game than other cryptocurrencies. Almost everything you can do on other protocols will eventually be possible on Bitcoin, or layers built on top of it. It just might take a little longer than some of you would like to see.

This brings us to the topic of Bitcoin’s price. At the time of writing this article, the price is sitting at $23,000. While everyone seems afraid of financial markets at the moment or if this is a bull trap, there are two things you can count on almost every year with Bitcoin. There will be moments of extreme panic when the price drops and people will declare Bitcoin to be dead. And there will also be moments of pure euphoria when the price recovers that causes people to become bullish once again. It happens every year and even happened in 2022. I feel very confident in saying that at the end of 2023 Bitcoin’s price will be higher than it is today. 5 years from now, it will be much, much higher. Seize the opportunity.

How about you? How do you think Bitcoin will perform in 2023?

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