Chinese analysts expect the current bitcoin bear market to continue in 2019, contradicting the bullish projections of crypto bulls like Mike Novogratz, who predicts that the bitcoin price will hit record highs this year.

“In 2018, bitcoin became an investment black hole,” according to the state-run Beijing News. “Entering 2019, bitcoin prices are still showing signs of decline, and there is no obvious rebound.

For bitcoin’s trend in the new year, pessimism is more dominant.

Xiao Lei, a currency policy analyst, attributed the Crypto Winter to the meteoric price spikes that virtual currencies experienced in 2017, saying such explosive growth was unsustainable. As a result, the market reacted by tumbling.

“The price of bitcoin rose more than 20 times in 2017. That increase is definitely unsustainable,” Lei says.

Analyst: Crypto Is a Zero-Sum Game

Crypto analyst Huang Liang (pseudonym) calls the virtual currency market a “zero-sum game”:

The cryptocurrency market is currently a transaction-driven zero-sum game. The money you earn can only come from the money in someone else’s pocket. You need to have more [noobs] enter the market and buy it at a higher price. The surge in 2017 was due to the fact that many newcomers entered the market because they were wooed by the new concepts of “blockchain,” “smart contract,” and “ICO,” — pushing prices up.

Many inexperienced newcomers are victims of scam artists in the crypto ecosystem. Victims fuel the current market collapse, according to Liang.

Sun Hang, a senior analyst at the TokenClub Institute has a similarly bearish outlook. Hang does not believe that the crypto market will rebound anytime soon because supply and demand are off-balance.

The Chinese government has been vocally anti-crypto and has repeatedly cracked down on bitcoin mining and shut down crypto exchanges, as CCN.com reported. However, the bans have been unsuccessful, as bitcoin miners still operate in the country.

Crypto’s Future Is the ‘Tokenization of Everything’

Despite the dire outlook of some Chinese analysts, American crypto investors like Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire insist that the bitcoin price will rocket over the next three years.

Irrespective of its daily price fluctuations, Allaire underscored that bitcoin has a “very significant role” to play as a scarce, non-sovereign store of value.

Bitcoin Price Will Soar over Next Three Years: Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire https://t.co/cJAQFUEzrj — CCN.com (@CCNMarkets) December 14, 2018

According to Allaire, some cryptocurrencies will eventually die off due to competitive forces. The market is not a zero-sum game. The success of one digital currency doesn’t mean the death of all others.

“I do not think it’s going to be a winner-take-all [scenario],” Allaire said. “We have a phrase: the Tokenization of Everything. We think cryptographic tokens are going to represent every form of financial asset in the world. There will be millions of them in years.”

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