Ronnie Moas says bitcoin’s ‘Netscape’ moment is coming

$5,000 anyone?

With $3,000 merely a blip in the rearview mirror, and $4,000 now vanquished, some of the bullish predictions out there for bitcoin may no longer be such a far-fetched fantasy. The cryptocurrency BTCUSD, +3.69%  was trading at about $4,217.80 on Monday, after shooting past the $4K mark a day earlier. Some said the move was due to Asian buyers bulking up on alternative investments amid some jitters over North Korea. Meanwhile, others attributed gains to hopes that transaction volumes for bitcoin will increase. In any case, bitcoin seemed to be following in the same vein as last week’s sprint to a record.

Independent analyst Ronnie Moas, who previously set his 2018 bitcoin price target at $5,000, said Monday he’s upgrading that to $7,500. His 2027 price target of $50,000 remains unchanged, but said there could likely go up in the next two years and even get pushed forward to 2024-2026. A Netscape moment for bitcoin: Moas said that in order for bitcoin to go from $4,177 (a level he was citing earlier on Monday) to $50,000 in 10 years would require 28% annual compounded growth. “I have gotten three times that in just the last six weeks with the 84% gain,” wrote Moas.

“It looks to me as though we are at the same point in the adoption curve as we were in 1995 when we went from one million internet users to 10 million. The following year the Netscape browser came online and we went from 10 million users to hundreds of millions of users overnight,” said Moas. Moas, and others who are buying cryptocurrencies, are counting on growing acceptance. For example, in two years time, he expects there will be between 50 million and 100 million cryptocurrency users, versus around 10 million currently. “We only have 0.15% market penetration right now — if that goes to 2% or 3% we will get to the $50,000 price target that I set at the beginning of July,” he said.

Moas wrote a 122-page report on cryptocurrency last month, in which he laid out that initial $5,000 price target for bitcoin, and predicted those digital currencies would steal market share from gold, metals, bonds and other currencies. As for Monday’s gains, at CoinDesk there was talk of pent-up demand coming through from investors who had been waiting to see how the so-called fork earlier this month panned out. Bitcoin Cash was the result of that fork, and a demand by bitcoin developers for a version of the crypotcurrency that lets miners process transactions faster.

David Http://markethive.com/david-ogden