Bitcoin Predictions for 2014: How the Pundits Fared

If there was one word that could describe bitcoin over the past year, it would be ‘unpredictable’. So, with that in mind and armed with 20/20 hindsight at year’s end, it’s fun to go back and look at all the people who tried to do just that.
Whether they prognosticated over the entrails of dead animals or defunct bitcoin exchanges, actual data or emotional investment, the results were – perhaps unsurprisingly – often far off the mark.
A large majority of bitcoin fortune-tellers focused on whether the price would go stratospheric or tank, but other more thoughtful commentators looked at other aspects of the digital currency ecosystem, such as venture investment, politics, or emergence of alternative currencies.
Let’s look at what the pundits predicted for bitcoin in 2014.
Price predictions
To put this year’s price projections into context, they were made at a time when bitcoin’s price had risen from under $100 to over $1,000 in a matter of months. Bitcoin had just emerged from Silk Road’s shadow, its critics found themselves on mute, and positive media coverage meant even non-technological family members were beginning to ask about bitcoin.
Rather than make predictions ourselves, CoinDesk outsourced the task to readers with a poll right as the new year rolled in, and one bitcoin was worth $775.
The result was that 56% of the 5,500 respondents expected bitcoin’s price to hit $10,000 before the end of the year. 31%, however, thought this unlikely and 13% responded “WTF are you smokin’?”
A Bank of America Merrill Lynch report in December 2013 said the bitcoin price “will stabilize around $1,300 per coin very soon”.

This post was published at Coin Desk on December 23, 2014.