Many Consumers Expect Bitcoin to Crash and Burn

Even with bitcoin way up, lots of folks are pessimistic.

Bad Tidings

Bitcoin may be up for now, but a sizable portion of consumers aren't expecting it to stay that way.

According to a new Deutsche Bank survey shared with Reuters and Bloomberg, consumers are torn about the future of the world's most valuable cryptocurrency, with a full third of respondents saying they think it'll crater by year's end.

Of the more than 3,600 people interviewed for the March edition of the monthly survey, only one percent said they think crypto is "just a fad" — but only 10 percent said they expect bitcoin, which is currently peaking at more than $69,000, to reach $75,000 and surpass its all-time high of $73,798 last month.

And another third of respondents said they expect bitcoin to fall below $20,000 by the end of 2024, which hasn't occurred since March 2023 in the aftermath of the FTX crash. Still, the size of that survey subset is apparently shrinking — as Reuters notes, March's 33-ish percent is down from 36 percent in January and 35 percent in February.

That level of waning consumer pessimism seems to be in line with a growing proportion of respondents who believe crypto is both valid and important. In September 2023, less than 40 percent of respondents said they think cryptocurrencies are an "important asset class and method of payment transactions," whereas in March, that percentage was up to 52.

Half-and-Half

Some analysts predict that April's upcoming "bitcoin halving" — a change in the currency's underlying blockchain to keep the number of bitcoin in circulation below the cap of 21 million — further boost the coin's value. While it's too soon to say how the markets will react to this once-every-four-year halving, it nevertheless does appear to be driving enthusiasm for bitcoin.

"You’re seeing a lot of continued traction that’s coming into the market because of the upcoming halving," Victoria Bills, the chief investment strategist at Banrion Capital, said in an interview with Bloomberg. 

The last time this change in circulation occurred was in 2020, when bitcoin's value leaped exponentially from $10,000 at the halving mark to above $60,000 by mid-2021.

Between the third of respondents who are pessimistic about bitcoin's value progression and the 10 percent who think it's going to keep increasing in price lies the more than 50 percent of respondents who, as we can infer from their exclusion from these reports, don't have their minds made up one way or another about how the currency is going to fare — which suggests that even those who respect it and other cryptocurrencies as a legitimate form of tender have no clue what to make of its hills and valleys.

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