After a month of bullishness the sentiment turned and the bears came back in charge. It is extremely hard to forecast whether we will get a bull run soon or a crypto winter like in 2014, but for the long term I am very certain that it will go up a lot. Since the bear market started in December extremely good news came out but it got totally ignored by the markets. I think it is fair to say that Bitcoin as an asset is much more valuable today than when it was priced at 20k a few months ago. 

>The price of Bitcoin went down significantly, but the value increased. DISCOUNT!

![bitcoin discount.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZg2kYaTkNczdyEAxkPpAZ5iYjdACveUpZ4mN27BJVWsc/bitcoin%20discount.png)
*60% discount compare to a few months ago while the value has increased!*

## Lightning Network will add huge value
In 2017 Bitcoin was not usable to buy coffee, tip someone or pay to read an article. In 2018 Lightning Network is enabling these use cases and in the years to come more features will be rolled out than we can imagine today. Some alt coins can do cheap and (near) instant payments already, but non of them is scalable enough to allow mass adoption while maintaining proper security.

Lightning will take back market share from certain alt coins, add market share through new use cases and enable big players like Amazon or Walmart to accept Bitcoin without clogging up the network. Big players could be waiting until LN is considered safe and usable enough before they come out with an announcement. At the moment pioneers are testing and improving the network, the next phase could be big retailers coming in!

## Billionaires are ready to join
When the worse part of the bear market was over the world most powerful people like Soros and the Rockefellers announced that they will start trading cryptocurrencies. The direct effect will be that huge amounts of money will enter the industry and the indirect effect on top of that will be that others will follow. 

## The Wall Street flood gates are about to open
Goldman Sachs is planning to open a Bitcoin trading desk, this will allow Wall Street investors to get easy access to physical bitcoins. Also the chance that an ETF will be approved is getting bigger every day now BTC becomes a serious asset class and the futures are available already. Considering that every single asset class on earth is heavily overvalued through years of free money and the 2nd longest bull market ever, easy access to an uncorrelated and decentralised asset like BTC on Wall Street could literary open the flood gates. 

## Countries are hit by (hyper) inflation
More and more countries are not able to control their inflation and people are losing their entire life savings because of failure of their government and banking system. In Venezuela and Zimbabwe hyperinflation is destroying the entire country and Argentina is about to follow. There are many other countries with double digit inflation and this will only get worse because of the global currency war that is raging on. The civilians of these countries will flee to assets like Bitcoin and increase demand. 

## The US dollar is losing it’s world reserve status
The FED is only able to print so much money out of thin air without being punished because of it’s reserve currency status that brings in constant demand. Since this year many counties have started to avoid the Dollar system, also powerful counties like China and Russia. The fact that the USD is losing ground will only trigger more entities to dump the dollar or stop using it. When the dollar loses it’s reserve currency status money printing on the current scale will cause the value to plummet and people all over the world will flee to an asset like Bitcoin. 

## Conclusion:
In the short term the Bitcoin price could go lower, but it could skyrocket too, it is very hard to make a prediction. However, in the long term I am very sure that Bitcoin will at least make another huge run. We will not speak about how many percent it went up, but about how many times. 

In a world with enormous financial disfunction, decreasing trust in government and and increasing digitalisation it is inevitable that a decentralised, indestructible and censorship resistant digital asset like Bitcoin will flourish. Add to that the limited supply and there is simply no other way to go for the bitcoin price than up.


![Bitcoin to the moon.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmS1X6wKrqrd1zYEX9hjCuJGoZt2thwqikLhBYnyz3cNHo/Bitcoin%20to%20the%20moon.jpg)
*The long term path of Bitcoin is clear: To the moon!*

*Disclaimer*
This is no financial advice, just my view on the market.

**Never stress in a bear market anymore: Follow my [diversification protocol](https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@michiel/diversification-protocol-no-stress-in-a-bear-market-always-funds-for-living-money-on-the-sidelines-to-buy-cheap-update-every)**

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