1. Break-out Companies

These are the companies that will successfully utilize blockchain technology to benefit consumers and the industry. These new crypto companies will be similar to Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter; multi-million dollar companies that arose from what seemed like the end of a technological era. First, it was the dot-com boom and now the crypto boom. There are a number of crypto projects that have aligned themselves with businesses that we know and love like Microsoft.

 

2. More Regulation

There is simply not enough manpower for the IRS to sift through everyone’s crypto history to determine who has paid and who has not paid. So instead, they have come up with a few sets of ridiculous rules that everyone should follow to make it easier for them to catch people that are laundering huge amounts of money. As of January 1st, 2018, the IRS would like you to treat your crypto to crypto trades as property to property and would like you to record everything. This poses a problem for people who do hundreds of trades a day. If you made a small amount of money trading or gambling with crypto and you don’t claim any of it, you may never run into trouble. If you made over $30,000 in one year with crypto through an exchange that has your info, the IRS may have you on their radar.

 

3. More misinformation and more scams

Bitcoin itself is not a scam but there are a ton of scams in the crypto community. Bitconnect could be seen as a Ponzi scheme. Some people may have heard about bitcoin in conjunction with Bitconnect and now associate Ponzi schemes with Bitcoin. Some common scams are websites that claim to “wash” your bitcoins for money laundering. There are deep websites that claim to double your BTC with stolen credit cards. There are also ICO scams, pump and dumps, bots, spyware, and plain theft. As the popularity of cryptocurrency increases, so will the complexity of the scams. Stay vigilant and keep your keys safe.

 

4. Technology focused News, Not Profit focused

The price has been the primary focus for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for the past few years and with good reason. There are a ton of people who became rich overnight, most people dream of this. Now that a large crash has happened and all of the bandwagoners have been shaken off, it is time for the nerds to get into the nitty-gritty. This last wave of excitement has drawn thousands of people to the crypto world that can benefit the industry by providing money for projects or providing their own knowledge on top of blockchain technology. More groups will be formed to create rather than trade once a universal understanding of the blockchain is in place. In the future, the government may start to provide grants to coders and entrepreneurs who could apply a blockchain technology to benefit the community in some way.

5. $30,000 Bitcoin

All other things equal, Bitcoin has a great shot at reaching $30,000 in 2018 or 2019. There are other coins that are much more deserving of being the top volume coin with a price tag of 30k per unit. Nonetheless, Bitcoin is the name that people know and in some cases, people might not know any other coin. Businesses that already accept bitcoin may not want to change so quickly. In general, it could pose a burden for large and minuscule businesses to switch from bitcoin to another coin. With that being said, Bitcoin still has steady growth for adoption, comprehension,  and price. Even though we’ve witnessed a huge crash, the value of bitcoin seems to still be undervalued when considering the all-time-highs and all-time-lows.