- If bitcoin follows historical trends, it could tip $1 million by February 1st 2028.
- Based on extrapolating Timothy Peterson’s ‘never look back’ chart which tracks bitcoin’s lower troughs.
- The chart echoes Plan B’s ‘stock to flow’ model which puts BTC at $1 million near the end of the next decade.
Plenty of analysts have predicted a million-dollar bitcoin. But few have targeted such a specific date. By analyzing historical bitcoin price action, however, it’s estimated that BTC could hit $1 million on precisely February 1st, 2018.
The million-dollar target has been extrapolated from Timothy Peterson’s ‘Never Look Back’ analysis.
Peterson explains that bitcoin maintains an ever-growing ‘Never Look Back’ price. In other words, a price floor that is never breached as adoption grows. You can visualise it best in the chart below.
Peterson said:
Bitcoin has a relatively unnoticed and — for most — unknown characteristic. I call it the “Never Look Back Price.” The NLB price is the last time bitcoin was at a particular price level. Once it reached that price, it only proceeded up, it never retraced to that value again.
How we get to $1 million bitcoin
When Peterson plotted the ‘Never Look Back’ price on a logarithmic scale, a strong trend emerged over bitcoin’s decade-long history. Up and to the right.
Craig Hammell, a software engineer at Coinbase, has since extrapolated the historical data to form a rough estimate of future price. The analysis includes a maximum price, minimum price, and median expected price.
Based on the model, bitcoin’s expected price on February 1st 2028 is $1 million. The maximum price on that date is almost $1.5 million.
Why ‘Never Look Back’ price matters
Peterson’s ‘never look back’ price represents the core adoption of bitcoin. It represents, as Trace Mayer puts it, the “hodlers of last resort.” People that have bought bitcoin and will hold it for the long, long term. Hence why it won’t drop back below a certain level.
This group’s behavior is not just long-term focused, it is infinite-term focused. These people are the bitcoin adopters. This group provides a floor value for bitcoin’s price.
This trend can also be seen in bitcoin’s annual low price. Rather than tracking the euphoric tops and volatile uptrends, look instead at bitcoin’s yearly lows. With the exception of one year, it has always grown.
HODLers are the floor. They are the revolutionaries that have preserved and grown Bitcoin.
Not the first million-dollar bitcoin price target
Bitcoin has always been subject to wild price targets. But 2019 has seen a wave of strong mathematical models to back up the predictions.
Best-known is bitcoin’s stock-to-flow model, published by pseudonymous bitcoin quantitative analyst Plan B. His work extrapolates price data based on the scarcity model used to track gold and silver. Bitcoin’s stock-to-flow model also puts bitcoin at $1 million some time after 2029.
#bitcoin path to $1.000.000.
Model based on stock-to-flow (SF). Note the powerlaw relationship: SF2x=Price10x is constant, over 8 orders of magnitude, with 95% R2. pic.twitter.com/sgIRzDyi4q— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) March 5, 2019
And who could forget John McAfee’s promise to “eat his d**k” on national television if bitcoin doesn’t hit $1 million by the end of 2020.
Come on people!!! It’s time to brush up your basic math skills and run some f*^#$ng numbers!!!! It is mathematically impossible for Bitcoin to be less than $1 mil by the end of 2020.
McAfee’s $1 million by the end of 2020 might seem farfetched, but a million-dollar bitcoin in the next ten years? It’s starting to sound plausible.
