Mooners and Shakers: Crypto market on edge, but British cryptographer Adam Back sees $10 million in Bitcoin’s future

Morning coin heads. Another set of US CPI inflation data (for January) looms this week, keeping risk market traders on edge at the moment. Meanwhile, Bitcoin, Ethereum and others are falling a fraction as we write.

We’ll get to some of the jittery price action in a second. But instead, let’s first focus on a couple of wildly positive thoughts we’ve noticed this morning, for an early Monday hopium hit…

Adam Back’s view on “hyperbitcoinization”.

… First, from Adam Back, who is an important British cryptographer, the CEO of the Bitcoin-focused blockchain company Blockstream, and the inventor of Hashcash, which is a system used in the Bitcoin mining process.

In this tweet (below) from Back posted a few hours ago, he refers to the claim that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has per averagedoubled (‘2X’) every year in the decade since January 2013. And yes, there’s some math tweaking there, since BTC certainly didn’t end up doubling in price in 2022.

But, Bitcoin OG notes that the statistics check out and that if it were to continue with its same average annual form, BTC will cross $10 MILLION per coin, with a market cap of $200 trillion within about nine years from now. , in accordance with the next two Bitcoin halving cycles.

Back has posed this type of thesis for Bitcoin’s future price before, comments in January that a USD 10 million BTC is not as far-fetched as it sounds, pointing to the idea that the US dollar could fall significantly in the coming years, along with Bitcoin gaining traction as a mainstream currency.

“It’s closer than it sounds along the road to hyperbitcoinization,” Back tweeted. “USD inflation is rising, e.g. aided by the Modern Monetary Theory justification of high inflation, so $1 becomes worth say 10c over a decade or two of monetary madness, then $10mil/BTC is $1mil/BTC in today’s money.

“And $100k Bitcoin doesn’t seem that far given we’ve already crossed the $10k threshold a few times when few expected even $1k a few years back and $10k seemed crazy.”

So then… keep “stacking sats” (satoshis – fractional denominations of BTC) in the meantime and play the long game? Judging by Back’s statistics, that may not be an unreasonable assessment.

Messari’s golden outlook for BTC

Meanwhile, looking a bit shorter, crypto market intelligence and data firm Messari has some interesting statistics of its own, with reference to the wake of “golden crosses” in Bitcoin’s chart.

A golden cross recently formed for Bitcoin, with its 50-day simple moving average turning above the 200-day simple moving average. Some traders tend to get a little skittish about it because it has sometimes been an indicator of a bullish run.

However, according to Messari’s statistics, price action for BTC may be somewhat weak in the month directly following the golden cross. But… Bitcoin has tended to swing significantly to the upside when looking six months, and a year ahead of the event, averaging +34% and +156% returns respectively.

Top 10 overview

Bitcoin (BTC) fell quite sharply when we started writing this roundup, but since then it has consolidated a bit back to the $21.8000 level that it seems comfortable resting on at the moment.

As we said earlier, the mid-week US CPI data is due this week and is very likely to keep risk market traders a bit on edge for now, or perhaps on the sidelines until January’s numbers either come in roughly as expected and perhaps a fraction lower than December’s, or “hot” and slightly higher.

We’re seeing mixed predictions around market expectations, but, as MarketWatch notes, “few things moved the US stock market last year like inflation data”. Prepare for a little more volatility this week, then.

Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100

With a market cap of around $10 billion to around $445 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour winners and losers at press time. (Statistics accurate at time of publication, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPS

• Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE), (market value: USD 667 million) +20%

• Reproduce (RNDR), (mc: USD 479 million) +11%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: USD 2.13 billion) +6%

• Internet computer (ICP), (mc: USD 1.59 billion) +5%

• Solana (SOL), (mc: USD 8.1 billion) +4%

DAILY SLUMPERS

• The Mina Protocol (MINA), (market value: USD 847 million) -10%

• Loop ring (LRC), (mc: USD 515 million) -7%

• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: USD 481 million) -7%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: USD 810 million) -6%

• Phantom (FTM), (market cap: USD 1.25 million) -6%

Around the blocks

Some relevance and randomness that stuck with us this morning is moving through the Crypto Twitterverse.