Bitcoin’s value may hit $50,000 mark this year and reach $120,000 by end of 2024: Standard Chartered

Since the beginning of the year, the price of Bitcoin has increased by 80%.

According to Standard Chartered, the value of the most popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin, might reach $50,000 (approximately Rs. 41,19,200) this year and $120,000 (about Rs. 98,85,800) by the end of 2024. This is because the recent increase in price of bitcoin may have encouraged “miners” to hoard more of the available supply. In April, Standard Chartered predicted that bitcoin would be worth $100,000 (approximately Rs 82,38,000) by the end of 2024, believing that the so-called “crypto winter” was over. However, one of the bank’s top FX experts, Geoff Kendrick, stated that there was now a 20% “upside” to that prediction.

“Increased miner profitability per BTC (bitcoin) mined means they can sell less while maintaining cash inflows, reducing net BTC supply and pushing BTC prices higher,” Kendrick said in a study.

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Bitcoin’s price has increased by an estimated 80% since the beginning of the year, but its current value of little over $30,200 (approximately Rs. 24,87,900) is still less than half of the $69,000 (about Rs. 56,84,000) it reached at its high back in November 2021. As interest rates were raised by central banks and a number of crypto companies, like the FTX exchange, collapsed in 2022, trillions of dollars were wiped out of the industry. The failure of several traditional banks this year has fueled the recovery, though.

The reason for the expected price increase, according to Standard Chartered, is that the 900 new bitcoins that are created every day across the world by miners will eventually need to be sold less often to meet their costs, which mostly consist of the electricity needed to operate supercomputers. According to Kendrick, recent sales by miners of their fresh coins have been 100%. They would most likely only sell 20 to 30 percent of the items if the price reached $50,000 (approximately Rs. 41,19,000).

“It is the same as miners selling just 180–270 bitcoins per day instead of the current 900,” said one miner.

“Over the course of a year, that would reduce miner selling from 328,500 to a range of 65,700-98,550 — a reduction in net BTC supply of roughly 250,000 bitcoins per year.”

Due to an internal supply and issuance process that progressively reduces supply to retain its attractiveness, the total amount of bitcoins that may be mined daily is likewise expected to decrease by half starting in April or May of next year. During previous bitcoin rallies, predictions of exorbitant prices were frequent. In November 2020, a Citi analyst predicted that by the end of 2022, bitcoin may reach a peak of $318,000 (approximately Rs. 2.6 crore). It ended the previous year at $16,500, a loss of almost 65 percent (or roughly Rs. 13,59,200 crore).