#57-Can I make it 4 out of 4? Bitcoin prediction!

Hans Chan -

What I’m Watching

I have a big appreciation for kitchen knives, particularly of the Japanese variety. Recently, I’ve been paying more attention to my diet again for weight loss and have been rewatching Burrfection’s excellent Youtube video that goes through how to sharpen a knife on a whetstone from beginning to end.

It’s not as intimidating as it seems! Most people think expensive knives are sharper when in fact it’s possible to achieve a higher sharpness with a £15 Amazon one compared to a £500 Miyabi if you know what you’re doing. And makes cooking so much more pleasurable.

Resource of the week

Zeiss lens cleaning solution is the only one I ever use for cleaning my electronics, glasses, watches and delicate things. Carl Zeiss makes some of the highest-end camera lenses in the world so I figured they would make a good lens cleaning solution. I’ve always been happy with it and much prefer it to off-brand alternatives I’ve used before.

Quote

“I believe that life is a process of continuous change and a constant struggle to make that change one for the better.”

Lee Kuan Yew

Thoughts

I’m most of the way through my cursive handwriting class, editing should start next week. Really looking forward to pushing this out and seeing what you guys think!

Bitcoin has had a strong 3 months, pushing it over $30k, which means that my 2023 Bitcoin prediction has already been reached! I’ve been pretty lucky with these, currently 3 out of 3 of my predictions have been correct, here’s the playlist on TikTok. So naturally the question is what’s going to happen next?
As always, making predictions with Bitcoin looks obvious in hindsight but is very difficult to tell in the moment. I always chuckle when influencers explain after the fact: 'the reason for the drop was because x bank failed or the price increase was because y whale bought a tonne'. The fact is there are 1,000s of variables and it's impossible to know with certainty.

What annoys me is you get these so-called ‘experts’ in the crypto space as well as the property space that make a prediction, and just constantly update it as the year goes on when it’s not going their way. Is that a prediction or just how things are currently looking? That’s not how I do things. I’ll give a price prediction and a specific timeframe where I will revisit whether it’s correct or wildly wrong. Fortunately, the latter hasn’t happened yet (not that it won’t!) but as my newsletter subscriber, I’ll give you my first scoop before I go ahead and make a video about it.

So to answer the question. It’s a very tricky one. Overall, in the economy, in the US and UK, we are in a period of stagflation. We had the crazy levels of inflation post-lockdowns, then the aggressive tightening we saw by way of base rate rises. Things have more or less settled down. We’re in a precarious balance of little economic and productivity growth but monetary policymakers have their hands tied in terms of not being able to stimulate the economy as more money printing or lowering of interest rates could send inflation rates soaring.

So my natural thought process is to look through history and take a look at when the last time we saw a similar situation? One could argue the US in the 1960s is analogous to now. Real GDP growth was near 0, which is basically what we’re seeing now. Inflation was 6%, latest figures show around 8% which is lagging, the Bank of England expects this to fall to 4% by Q3, so we’re very similar to the 1960s condition. Unemployment back then was 4% and according of ONS we’re at 3.7%. So on paper, it looks very comparable indeed.

How did investments perform then? Gold stayed fixed compared to the dollar for most of the decade. Of course, gold and Bitcoin are not the same thing and a quick look at the charts will show they can diverge a lot while sometimes they look aligned so clearly there are more forces at play. Stocks averaged around 8%, and there are times when we see Bitcoin move with the Nasdaq, so we need to consider that also. But that’s enough rambling.

All things considered, I think it’s going to be a rather uneventful rest of the year for Bitcoin. So as of 15th April 2023, I think Bitcoin will drop below $25,000 before the year is over.

Of course, all the usual caveats apply, don’t invest just based on this, I am by no means a crypto expert, this is just for entertainment. I could be wildly wrong, if I am, at least it will make for some good content. Eight months in the grand scheme of things is nothing, notwithstanding a completely random event can throw everything upside down as we saw with COVID. In life and in investing what 'should' happen and what does happen are often very different things!

What do you think? Let me know! Just hit reply.

Hans