How Bitcoin could reach $100K by the end of 2023 — Mark Yusko explains

People are waiting for this big macro pivot. It's probably not coming.

Many of you must be wondering, when will we finally see the end of this crypto winter? According to hedge fund veteran Mark Jusko, bitcoin has already bottomed and we are now in the crypto spring.

We gather momentum for the next crypto summer, which we'll anticipate the halving in early 2024.

In this interview, Jusko explained why the next crypto bull run may happen sooner than we expect, regardless of the macroeconomic. He also shared his outlook on bitcoin's price for the following months. Before we get into it, as always, don't forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel. I'm Giovanni, your host. Welcome to another cointelegraph interview. You recently claimed that bitcoin has already hit the bottom and now we are in a crypto spring. What makes you think so?

I think if you break out the four year cycle into four, four seasons, winter, spring, summer and fall, you tend to get about a 15 month period for crypto winter. And in crypto summer and then nine month periods for crypto spring and crypto fall, we had crypto winter. We peaked in November of last year around 67,500. The fair value at that time of the bitcoin blockchain was probably somewhere in the high 20s, right around 30,000. And we were too high. There was too much leverage in the system. That all got reversed when they approved the bitcoin futures ETF instead of the spot etf. And by approving the futures etf, you basically allow big institutions, particularly banks, to go short the bitcoin market without actually having to have exposure to the underlying bitcoin. And that put downward pressure on prices. That led to liquidations, liquidations of leverage, speculators and gamblers, led to the crash and the bear market. And I believe that that relentless downward movement ended on June 13. So I had tweeted right before that, right before Father's Day in mid June, that, you know, we were stuck in this descending triangle. You know, we were stuck around 30,000 and we were bouncing, but each bounce was lower. And it's this, this terrible chart pattern called a descending triangle. Well, we didn't get all the way to 15. We got to 17:5 on that wick down on the 13th. And so I think that was the bottom. I think that was the cathartic bottom. I think we're in crypto spring. And spring doesn't mean straight up, right? That's summertime parabolic move. More speculators. Spring is kind of yuck, right? It's kind of windy, it's kind of rainy, it's kind of muddy. And we kind of just bounce along and consolidate. And I think that's where we are. I think we're in this nine month period from kind of June to, to first quarter of next year where, you know, we consolidate, we gather momentum for the next crypto summer, which we'll anticipate the halving in early 2024.

So that's a very interesting point of view. Although you haven't mentioned one of the main macro factors that apparently has been driving the markets in the latest few months, which is the Fed's monetary policy. So most analysts agree that as long as we don't see a pivot in the Fed's policies and we don't see the Fed stop raising interest rates, we are likely to see a recovery in crypto markets.

Yeah, I have a different view on that. I actually don't, I don't buy that argument. Right. You know, I think people mistakenly classify Bitcoin as a risk asset. It's not. It can have periods of time where it functions similar, or I shouldn't say functions where it acts similar to a risk asset because of the types of market participants that are participating in the market. When you have a very illiquid market like that, it is prone to booms and busts driven by market activity. People say, oh, well, it didn't, it didn't act as a store of value. Well, no, it actually did. So The Fed from 2020 to 2021 printed half of all the dollars that existed in the history of the Republic. Okay. It's a long time, 246 years. Okay, here's the interesting thing. Bitcoin went from 10,000 to 20,000, exactly what it should have done, but it went to 70,000. That had nothing to do with Bitcoin. That had to do with speculation and gambling. And so if we look at today, today the fair value of the network has fallen back down to 20,000. Well, why is that? Well, fewer transactions, less writing to the mempool, smaller transaction sizes. There have been fewer actual participants in, in the bitcoin network. And that's because people saw the price fall and they freaked out and they backed away. And so now we're at this really interesting place where the fair value and the actual value are very tight and people are waiting for this big macro pivot. It's probably not coming right. The Fed's probably not going to double the money supply Again, so we're probably not going to have a devaluation induced price rise.

Okay, so you're basically saying that according to you, we don't need the Fed to change its monetary policies in order to see the next crypto bull market.

Yes, absolutely. And it would have to do with increased adoption, increased usage, more people holding it in wallets, more people utilizing it.

Okay, so you're basically saying that the crypto summer will come relatively soon. I would say in a few months from now. But still you foresee that the prices of equities will continue going down. So if I understood correctly, you are envisioning a decoupling of crypto from equities, is that correct?

Ultimately, I view these markets as not correlated and independent of one another. And people say, oh, but, but Bitcoin and the markets were correlated from November to June. Of course they were in liquidations. In bear markets, in liquidations, everything's correlated. International stocks, emerging market stocks, US stocks, bonds, everything goes down again, because liquidations are different than bear markets. Liquidations are when there's too much leverage in the system and people are forced to sell. And again, they don't get to sell what they want to sell, they sell what they have to sell. And that's usually the most liquid assets. So I do believe that we're going to see investors look to their portfolio and say, hmm, higher rates probably means lower growth rates in the future because we got tighter liquidity conditions. Which means I probably want to have less exposure to growth assets. I probably want to have more exposure to diversifying assets that protect my portfolio. Well, bonds don't work in a rising rate environment. So how about digital assets? And my belief is that people will look at the digital assets and look at the long term data and say, huh, they're quite uncorrelated to other assets because the drivers of digital assets are not the same as traditional assets. Traditional assets are driven by economic growth, Fed policies, inflation. Crypto is driven by the technology itself. Millennial adoption. That digital divide is so acute and so wide. And what people miss, I think, is there's 37 odd trillion dollars with a T trillion. That's going to go from my generation, the boomers, to your generation, the echo boomers. That's a lot of money. That money's not going to stay at Merrill lynch and UBS and invest in municipal bonds and IBM. I believe it's going to migrate into the digital asset ecosystem and put constant rising pressure on prices.

This kind of process that you have been describing is probably going to Take a while. It's a process that will take years to play out. So when you talk about the crypto summer, it seems to be more of a short term, medium term sort of event. And so what is the catalyst that will trigger this crypto summer?

Oh, anticipation of the having. Right. So the four year cycle is alive and well and you know, the next having occurs, you know, January, February of 2024. And usually the market will anticipate that by about nine months. So we're talking about, you know, April, May of next year and then, and remember, it feeds upon itself. So the first investors come in because they look at the value and then they look at the price and say, well, the price is below the fair value. So if the value of the network is around 20,000 and the price is 19,000, I'm gonna buy that. Then as the price moves up into the low 20s and the value starts to creep up, now the traders just get involved because like, oh, it's moving, you know, it's going up. Well, then what happens is people look at the halving and say, well, if the block rewards get cut in half to 3.25 from six point, you know, 6.25 to 3.125 from 6.25, then the price has got a double ish in order for the miners to continue to make money. Now the miners can get a little more efficient, they can maybe move to lower price electricity, but bottom line is the price has got to roughly double.

I want to talk about your bitcoin price prediction. You recently said that you stick to Bitcoin to $250,000 in the next three to five years, if I remember correctly. So can you go through this price prediction and tell us how this is going to play out now?

It's a great question. So the 250 comes from simple math. It's three to five years. And it comes from, from simple math that if we take gold, the gold value in the world is 10 trillion. But half of that doesn't count, right? It's chalices and jewelry and stuff that you can't really use. The other half is the monetary value. The bricks and bars that sit in people's, you know, accounts and, you know, Fort Knox and, you know, Swiss bank vaults and all that stuff. That's five trillion. Five trillion, okay. If you think about 21 million, Bitcoin is probably less than that. You know, you do that math and you get a 250k number. Okay, that works for me. So gold equivalents is about 250k. When would that happen? Look, if the next halving, we add another zero, so we go from 10,000 to 100,000 and then we get that speculative bubble in 2024, 2025 that pushes us into speculation. Could we get to 250? 200 is probably more likely, but 250 is possible.

Awesome. That was a very interesting outlook, Mark. So I'm really excited to talk to you again in a few months and see how things will have played out by then. So it was awesome to have you on our show. Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Giovanni. Really appreciate it.