Less than twelve hours after reaching the $10,000 milestone, Bitcoin prices gained more than $1000, surpassing $11,000 – but is such a swift climb really a good thing for the top cryptocurrency?

At roughly 7:30 p.m. EST on Friday, Bitcoin prices crossed the $10,000 threshold – a level it has not seen since March of 2018.

From there, it climbed quickly, gaining more than $800 in less than four hours.

After a slight pullback to $10,500 territory, Bitcoin resumed a steady climb, breaching the $11,000 mark at around 8:15 a.m. this morning.

At press time, the price of Bitcoin has retreated back under $11,000 and is currently trading at around $10,809.

Breaking the $10,000 Barrier

The $10,000 level is an important one for Bitcoin, as many experts believe it represents a ‘psychological barrier’ that, once passed, will bring institutional investors back into the market.

In an interview with Binance CTO Wei Zhou earlier this month, Fundstrat Co-Founder Tom Lee said:

Every institution is going to realize, look at $10,000 ‘it’s likely to go back to its all-time high, which is double. There are very few things that can double. So I think FOMO truly gets triggered once bitcoin hits $10,000.

He also added:

If Bitcoin somehow manages to get to [$10,000], it’s very likely going to make a run to $40,000 within five months.

Thank God for the Pullback

That’s right. I said it. I’m actually relieved to see Bitcoin prices drop a bit. No, it’s not because I want to buy the dip (though if I could, I would).

Now that Bitcoin has well and truly crossed above $10,000, Twitter is rife with comments like this:

In 2017, it took 19 days for #bitcoin to go from $10k to $20k.. so, we can expect new ATH by July 10.#Predictions — Vijay (@_vi00) June 22, 2019

When #Bitcoin broke 10K for the first time, it only took 19 days for it to hit 20K. The chart below is a refresher of the power of the king of crypto ( $BTC ) when it pumps. pic.twitter.com/l3Y6qwPjQs — K A L E O (@CryptoKaleo) June 21, 2019

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to return to the market conditions of 2017.

Don’t get me wrong, I want Bitcoin prices to go up – and I think that they will – but I want them to go up sustainably.

In the last few months of 2017, Bitcoin burst onto the world stage in a HUGE way. Both mainstream and crypto news sites were chock full of stories about people who had purchased Bitcoin when it was just knee-high to Junebug and became millionaires overnight during the runup.

People who had no understanding of either cryptocurrency OR investing saw this and thought “I can make millions quickly too!”

They invested their life savings, maxed out credit cards, took out second and third mortgages, and spent student loan money all because they had heard about this new “magic internet money” – and let’s face it, that’s all it was to a lot of people at the time – that could make them rich.

The problem was that $20,000 Bitcoin wasn’t sustainable at the time, much less the higher valuations that were being predicted.

Yes, the public attention and burgeoning interest from Wall Street – including the launch of Bitcoin futures trading by the CBOE and CME Group – contributed to Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in price, but I also think that part of it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Everybody wanted to know how high Bitcoin would go by year’s end. $15k? $20k? For some reason, $20,000 seemed to be the brass ring and so we pushed ourselves – and pushed the market.

And then 2018 was ushered in and governments started to wake up to what crypto adoption could mean. Lack of regulatory clarity, taxation concerns, and countries banning and unbanning cryptocurrencies willy nilly created an environment of uncertainty that began to scare people off.

Prices started to drop and people panicked and so prices dropped even more, spawning the crypto winter that saw Bitcoin lose more than 80% of its value in less than a year.

Do we really want to go through that again?

In my opinion, Bitcoin will be much better off with a slow, steady rise that doesn’t spook regulators.