- Bitcoin could hit $300,000 in 2022 based on previous cycles, Carl Runefelt says.
- He started investing in bitcoin in 2017 after holding gold and silver as an alternative to fiat.
- He also says he holds altcoins that are tied to projects he believes in.
Carl Runefelt, 27, is the host of The Moon, a YouTube channel with 544,000 subscribers. His videos are all about bitcoin, altcoins, and technical analysis of cryptos.
He’s also the cofounder and chief marketing officer of Kasta, a company proposing a cryptocurrency that would offer staking with a plan to introduce a debit card for transactions. It hasn’t announced a token sale.
He first got into crypto in 2017 by investing in bitcoin.
“The reason why I started with bitcoin was because I was already heavily invested in physical gold and silver,” Runefelt said. “In the years prior, I researched a lot about the financial system, about the monetary system, and about the US dollar, the
Federal Reserve
, and other central banks around the world. And in my opinion, it seemed like a very old and bad system, also a quite corrupt system.”
He said he’d thought gold and silver were the alternatives to fiat until he heard about bitcoin, which he believes is a digitally superior choice for three main reasons.
First, bitcoin is scarcer than gold because there will only ever be 21 million tokens, giving it a hard cap. Second, it’s more easily divided into smaller parts, known as satoshis. And third, it’s more easily transferable, allowing holders to move millions and even billions of dollars’ worth of it with low transaction fees.
Runefelt argued that the US dollar and other fiat currencies had lost value over time, contrary to their function as a store of value. By some estimates, the purchasing power of $1 in 1920 is equivalent to nearly $14 today because of inflation. And though bitcoin doesn’t have a long track record, its proponents see its limited supply as a reason it will better hold its value over time.
Bitcoin has recently had a steep price correction: In early November it touched $70,000 before plunging by about 34% within a month.
Regardless of bitcoin’s
volatility
, Runefelt believes it’ll have a fast comeback, he said. After bitcoin broke a key support line at $53,000, a sharp correction brought it down to $48,000, and it’s likely to trade near this price for the next two to three months before an increase, he said.
“Usually when we see a huge correction like this with big volume, that means that buyers need time to kind of gain back the momentum,” Runefelt said. “So we are most likely going to consolidate and not go bullish for quite some time.”
He estimated that once bitcoin breaks back above $53,000, it could climb by as much as $100,000 in three or four weeks. And Runefelt believes that by the end of next year bitcoin could be at about $300,000; previous cycles suggest this would be the most likely scenario, he said.
“The trend is your friend for bitcoin,” Runefelt said. “And the trend for 13 years now would suggest that bitcoin should top out at approximately $300,000 and then go into a three-year
bear market
.”
If bitcoin rises that high, it would validate the forecast from Runefelt and others including Citigroup’s Thomas Fitzpatrick and the crypto consultant Michaël van de Poppe. Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood went even higher, with a $500,000 long-term call. But contrarian views abound, driven by concerns about regulation and whether cryptos are in a bubble.
The $300,000 projection is based on bitcoin’s four-year halving cycle, represented in the stock-to-flow chart showing the number of years required to achieve the current stock at the current production rate. Bitcoin’s price has tended to increase with that number.
Altcoin season
Altcoins usually rally shortly after bitcoin peaks, a trend popularly referred to as altcoin season. Many crypto investors are watching bitcoin’s price action and expecting this to play out again. But Runefelt doesn’t think altcoins will follow the same pattern.
“We have already seen altcoins rallying very, very strongly in the past few months. I think we’re going to continue to see that,” Runefelt said. “I think the likely scenario is that we will continue to see altcoins go bullish before bitcoin tops out.”
He thinks that because altcoins have already rallied hard, they will correct at the same time bitcoin does — but more steeply and quickly.
Runefelt said that while he holds a large altcoin portfolio and even invests in presales for altcoins, he sticks to ones that are backed by strong projects that he personally believes in.
Ethereum is one of his top picks because it has the biggest network effect relative to other platforms.
He said he also holds binance coin and swissborg because they are exchanges with daily active users. Regardless of whether we are in a bull or bear market, they tend to hold their value compared with other altcoin projects with investors weaving in and out of positions trying to make a quick buck, he said.