Trace Mayer

Trace has formal education in Accounting and Law and he studied Austrian economics, he also was a blogger back when Bitcoin was in its infancy and began recommending his audience to invest when it was at $0.25.

I wanted to begin today’s video with Trace’s thoughts as an example of what a long time Bitcoin believer sees as a realistic valuation for this year and the years to come.

His thoughts on the price of Bitcoin for this year are pretty conservative compared to the others I’ve covered so far.

Back in October 2017, about 2 months before the dramatic run up to it’s new all time highs in mid-December, Trace was predicting Bitcoin’s price to hit $27,000 in February 2018. Citing its 200 day moving average as the reason for this price to be a reasonable valuation.
He gave another prediction in January, 3 months later after seeing the price movements in December and the recoil in January. This time he mentioned that if Wall Street investors wanted to get into Bitcoin, that Mountain of money could catapult Bitcoin’s price to $115,000 this year, which would be quite over valued. Until this happens Trace sees Bitcoin hovering in the $9,000-$14,000 range for the remainder of this year.

View Video Here^^^^^

Max Keiser

Max is a financial analyst and has a show on RT called the Keiser Report with his lovely cohost Stacey Herbert.

Frankly I don’t care if this comes off as biased, but I’m a huge fan of their show. It’s either the great banter between the two hosts or the plethora of information they cover in the short amount of time or just the sheer enthusiasm and passion that pretty much oozes out of Max, but I’m a fan and I’m going to recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.

Max isn’t usually one to dole out price predictions and I can respect that, but instead of price predictions he’s got some interesting concepts about how game theory has scaled with the growth of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. First with the miners staking their claims with this new tech, and now it’s moving onto the sovereign level where different countries are trying to figure out how to best approach these new concepts of blockchain technology and borderless, digital currencies. He does say that he sees the future of Bitcoin hitting the $100,000 mark but doesn’t provide a timeline.
His other predictions for cryptocurrencies in 2018 include:

• Influx of institutional investors- 2017 brought us BTC futures thanks to the CME and CBOE, this could set the stage for ETFs in 2018. Which would lead more institutional investors into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
• Increased pressure to tax cryptocurrency gains- the court case between Coinbase and the IRS was a hint that they are interested in knowing who’s invested in what and they type of gains they’ve made that they haven’t been reporting. If you’ve at all made it public that you’re making trades with cryptos, be prepared to pay taxes on your gains or else risk being audited.
• Increased Regulations - Which could lead to big price swings like we saw with every announcement out of China in 2017.

As it turns out, my time spent organizing this series has sent me down one of those rabbit holes so I’m going to end with the Max Keiser today. Although this one might be leaving something to be desired, I’ll be back tomorrow with more insights and some thought provoking dialogue for you all as we explore how Cliff High and his Web Bot makes predictions and also, the infamous bet that John McAfee waged that could end up seeing him turn into a self-inflicting cannibal of sorts.