Bitcoin turned 14 years old on Tuesday, and what a year it's been for the adolescent cryptocurrency. After hitting a peak of more than $68,000 in November, 2021, its price declined throughout 2022 and is currently hovering around $17,000.
That marks a 13 percent decline from six months ago, and a 60 percent fall over 2022.
At the same time, the crypto market that Bitcoin helped create has suffered a series of spectacular financial collapses and scandals that are set to continue into the new year. Fellow cryptocurrencies such as Solana, for instance, are down nearly 100 percent since this time last year, while crypto exchanges such as FTX are under criminal investigation for fraud.
Trading volume also declined steadily through 2022, including a massive drop-off following the bankruptcy of FTX and the bearish sentiment that came with it.
In other words, things are not looking good for young Bitcoin, especially compared to the overly optimistic predictions of last year. (One industry expert told Cheddar in January that he predicted the price would hit $400,000 per token in 2022.)
However, some perspective might be in order. Bitcoin's first market price was $0.00099 in 2009, meaning the price has gone up around 1.7 billion percent. That's not bad for a digital asset that serves no purpose whatsoever outside of financial speculation.
Yet replicating that level of growth at its current price is essentially impossible (as it would give Bitcoin a market value worth more than all the money currently circulating on the planet) so the question remains: What's next for this volatile teenage digital asset?
Some Bitcoin bulls are holding out for another rally, but not before more pain. Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, wrote in a recent blog post that he expects Bitcoin to drop into the $10,000-$12,000 range before shooting back up to $30,000.
On the other end of the spectrum, Standard Chartered in a research note predicted that Bitcoin will fall as low as $5,000 as "more and more crypto firms and exchanges find themselves with insufficient liquidity."
