Although Bitcoin is electronic and moves quickly, the real world doesn't. Since Bitcoin has been in the news, millions of people have decided to put their own money into the Crypto world and press their luck.
So here's what's driving the price.
Let's say you want to buy IOTA, it's not offered on Coinbase, you need to first get an account at Bittrex which are only fundable in Crypto. You therefore need a Coinbase account hooked up to your bank account to be able to dump fiat and buy either Bitcoin or Ether (and get hit by the 7% fee). Then, and only then, you can fund your Bittrex with BTC and buy your altcoin of choice.
So this is driving the price of BTC higher, as there is precious little supply of BTC.
In FX terms, this is called real money flows - and as Deutsche Bank noted recently, Japanese men have become 'crypto day traders' - but the real upward pressure is by using BTC as a base/funding currency.
So, as crypto exchanges are experiencing huge bottlenecks, which means a squeeze on price is in effect, what do you think will happen when Coinbase allow you to directly buy all the most popular altcoins directly without the need for the use of Bitcoin as a funding currency?
The millions of people investing thousands of dollars into the slow, inefficient, and feature poor performing Bitcoin and Ether will no longer have any use for these "top" coins. This will likely causes the price to fall as Coinbase supplies a viable alternative approach.
No man bicoin will never go down in 2018 it will go up to 300-400 k .
I would be inclined to agree that the price would continue to rise, but BTC is not a very efficient crypto as a trading currency and once there's more options to buy the other coins, I think it'll take a hit.
I guess we'll see when Coinbase finally do make things like IOTA tradable on their platform. If the price of BTC goes down in the days after such a launch, you'll know my theory holds water.
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