Much of the ink that is spent on papers, and the words that are written in the cyberspace focus on Bitcoin, its future, impact on the society, price, and other related affairs. However, many new investors ignore the fact that altcoins not only exist, but also, that they represent another sector of importance when it comes to usage: people hold, trade, and sometimes, spend altcoins in the form of Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar Lumens, Dash, and many more. Not everything starts and ends with Bitcoin.
Yes, the present and future of Bitcoin take up the majority of interest in the crypto community, but what is going to happen with altcoins? Will they have the same staying power of BTC? Will there be a particular token that can compete with the “beast”?
The Next Price Surge Won’t Include Altcoins
According to American broadcaster and bitcoin bull Max Keiser seems to have a particularly harsh opinion when it comes to altcoins. He suggests that the most recent price surge in the industry won’t include altcoins, in a rather revealing interview with news network CNBC at the start of the week.
Keiser identifies people’s newfound trust in Bitcoin’s chain as the primary reason behind his remarks. He says that people have been adopting Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the Lightning Protocol, and they now have a better understanding about the store of value that bitcoin can offer. He says that investors are eager to move their digital assets into “the most secure chain.”
He even forecasted that altcoins will be worth pennies, or go out of existence in the majority of cases, because all of people’s money “is going to flow into bitcoin.” According to the expert, due to BTC’s dominance of the market (currently at 60 percent, a number that has been creeping up for quite some time now,) “the altcoin phenomenon is finished.”
The Market Dominance Factor
While right now, the dominance factor favors Bitcoin with the aforementioned 60 percent, Keiser says that the number will keep growing in the future, with a projection that could take it to the 80 or 90 percent range.
As surprising as it may sound to some pundits in the field, Keiser isn’t the only one that thinks altcoins’ days are numbered. In fact, Peter Brandt, a recognized trader and author, said recently that BTC will keep its upwards trend but other coins will not enjoy the same fate. The opposite happened in 2017, when altcoins did enjoy a market surge just as BTC, but as Brandt put it, “cryptomaniancs expect alts to do so again — they may be very disappointed.”
Naeem Aslam, who is currently ThinkMarkets chief market analyst, forecasted that BTC will be worth between $60,000 and $100,000 during its next bullish market, an unprecedented figure given that its maximum value, achieved on January 2018, as nearly $20,000.
In fact, that $20,000 threshold will be, according to Aslam, the one that, once cleared, serves as the “floor” in future price discussions that can take the next target to $50,000, and once there, to $100,000.
At the moment of writing this piece, BTC was exchanging hands at $10,313.21, down a little over 7 percent over the last 24 hours. The most valuable altcoin, Bitcoin Cash, was worth $408.71, and ETH checked in at $287.73.
By Andres Chavez
