I'm not even kidding guys. It has become clear that Bitcoin is entering the mass market now, though still just at the very start of it. While the 11x in the past 11 months has been astounding, this is just the beginning.
We will see 6 figures before 2020. Bitcoin user adoption is gonna grow from a couple dozen million now to hundreds of millions the next two years. Institutional investment in Bitcoin is gonna grow from basically non-existent now to a major new asset class for wall street in the next two years. $100k in two years might actually be a low prediction.
Im hoping that the lightning network comes by late 2018, or at least that's what Matt Corallo aka TheBlueMatt on twitter has guesstimated. If LN can come and they can get it done right, then we can finally "bank the unbanked" and everyone will be able to transact in the global bitcoin economy, fast and cheap. Store of value + fast velocity transactions all on the same currency would easily make it go several trillion dollars up on the marketcap, surpassing gold. Only at $1Trillion, i think the price would be sitting around $80,000, considering the available supply et al.
We have definitely been surprised with the $10k correction becoming true, and im sure we will be surprised again rather soon. The future is brighter than ever for bitcoin now that we don't have the hardfork trolls anymore. Don't fall for the FUD, specially when they come from legacy banking CEO dinosaurs.
That would be great if LN arrives by end of 2018. Personally I'm not even sure LN will be THE solution. It's what everyone talks about but after hearing about how Ethereum's Raiden Network would work (which is their LN equivalent) I have some serious doubts about LN. Even if it does provide the solution Bitcoin is looking for, I'd be surprised if it hit before 2019. I mean I'm just guessing, but I would think maybe it would hit testing by the end of this year and then maybe a few months later sometime in 2019 it would go live, and then you need all the clients to implement LN transactions, and you need the actual LN nodes to be set up. I don't see it really being in use until close to 2020. I mean hell Segwit activated months ago and it still has barely even been implemented into clients, segwit transactions are at like 10-12% right now.
But yeah if LN is a good solution, whenever it is all set up and in use Bitcoin will finally be the global payments solution that it is trying to be. Though I'm pretty damn sure well before that happens the Core team is gonna have to agree to fork to larger blocks or else we're gonna have really high fees for a couple years and that will hurt Bitcoin.