First, Bitcoin (BTC) stabilized at the $30k mark for many previous months. Then, a couple of weeks back, it crashed to $26k, a price level it’s been stuck on again. The bears are winning but the bulls may have better days coming.
Elon Musk had a hand in the last crash, selling its holding of Bitcoins, and sending the wrong message to the market.
Is he back at it again?
Musk’s X plans
A leak has suggested Musk could turn X (Twitter) into an “updated version of PayPal, the payments giant that Musk’s X.com created when it merged with Confinity in March 2000.
Earlier this month, Paypal launched a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin PYUSD. Fox News reported that Musk “continues to have conversations with top Wall Street executives on the future of X.”
“Seems to be settling on a new-fangled payment system, [an] updated version of PayPal. It will offer low transaction costs (as opposed to credit cards) and monetize user info.”
Musk denied rumors he would launch a cryptocurrency that will rival BTC, Ethereum, DOGE coin, or other digital currencies. But an X with a PayPal-like function could boost the crypto market and BTC with it.
PayPal’s support for Bitcoin and crypto in late 2020 helped launch a price bull run that propelled the leading crypto to nearly $70k.
Inmortal
Pseudonymous analyst Inmortal tells his 198,700 followers on the social media platform X that he expects Bitcoin to first witness another crash to near $20,000 levels. He then expects a rally above $50,000.
While no one can predict that, the analyst draws a parallel between BTC’s price action in the latter months of 2019 when it broke below its support at around $10,000 and dipped all the way down to the $6,000 level. In October 2020, BTC started a massive rally on the way to $60k
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading for $26,063.
Read: Bitcoin crashes under $26K, recovers slightly, as SpaceX sells BTC holdings
Ugly August
Although BTC is still some 60 percent short of its November 2021 all-time high value of $69,000, it almost doubled in value between the beginning of January and early April.
But August has become BTC’s worst month of 2023 producing an 11 percent loss in value. The BTC price declined 13.9 percent in August of 2022 prompting a snowball effect that saw prices tumble over a six-month period to mid-teens in dollar terms.
September is also traditionally a poorly performing month for BTC. If BTC mirrors this August’s performance or sheds around 10% off of its price, we could end up with $22-23K levels next month.
Pre- and post-halving boost
Q4 might see a rebound as BT|C miners should begin to bid prices higher prior to the April 2024 halving or before their marginal revenue is effectively halved per mined block.
The Bitcoin hash rate is already headed into new territory, hitting 400 th/s for the first time ever. The hash rate is an estimation of the processing power dedicated to mining.
The four-year halving cycles that BTC goes through could foreshadow a bull run around 2024/2025.
Halving occurred three times already in 2012, 2016, and 2020, and preceded large-scale price rallies that led to a new all-time high value for BTC/USD.
The supply of Bitcoin is fixed at 21 million, and as such with fewer BTCs on the market, demand will outstrip supply and prices are likely to go up around these events.
It’s always good to be cautious because although the bulls are anxiously waiting for more signs of growth, nothing is assured in crypto.
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