According to Dow Jones Market Data, January will mark the 6th consecutive month of losses for Bitcoin, causing more FUD to be spread.

The financial media is salivating to churn out countless articles on the ongoing price of Bitcoin. The wild bull run of late 2017 was met with the harsh bear market of 2018, and those in the centralized financial ecosystem couldn’t have been happier. Now they’re noting that BTC, at the end of January, will have suffered six consecutive months of losses.

Bears Still out in Force

MarketWatch recently reported that, if things remain unchanged, this circumstance would be the first time that Bitcoin had suffered six consecutive months of losses. They then note that the pain of the price of BTC will likely continue as they cite market analyst Jani Ziedins and Travis Kling, chief investment officer for Ikigai Asset Management.

Ziedins says:

There are cases like the dot-com bubble where the revolution was legitimate, the investors just got excited a little too early. Will bitcoin do the same in 10 years? I have my doubts. First, the magical thing about bitcoin was that by design it has a fixed supply. That was supposed to prevent manipulation and inflation. Bitcoins would get more valuable as time went by and their popularity increased. And that would have worked in a bubble. But bitcoin didn’t operate in a bubble and its popularity attracted countless copycats that greatly diluted the cryptocurrency market.

Kling expressed a more long-term upbeat approach while still saying the bear market pain will continue. He tweeted:

We need more. More exchanges gone. More projects shuttering. More SEC enforcements. More developer ragequits. More ICO Treasury selling. More layoffs. More fund liquidations. More scammers exposed. More failed cap raises. More “crypto is dead”. Only then do we move higher 🙂

No Need to Panic

It should go without saying that this FUD should be considered in context. It is true that Bitcoin price has dropped 80 percent from its all-time high in mid-December 2017. However, that bull run was fueled by hype and FOMO (fear of missing out). BTC became the get-rich-quick method for anyone watching the news, and they jumped on board, buying all the bitcoins they could.

This led to the massive increase in price, which was reinforced by more positive media coverage, which then led to more people jumping in. The result was an artificially-inflated market that would eventually come back down to earth, which it did.

Another point is that the six months of losses is kind of misleading. This time frame features two periods of relative BTC price stability. The only notable drop of a large amount happened in mid-November 2017 when BTC fell from $6,358 to $3,761. That is a significant drop to be sure, but the rest of the six-month time frame is surprisingly stable.

To be honest, drops in the price of BTC is to be expected. These are growing pains as the marketplace adapts to how cryptocurrencies are being slowly integrated into the mainstream. Governments are starting to grapple on how best to label and regulate the industry. The Wild West environment that cryptocurrencies operated within is now growing up.

While some may decry increased regulation, the result is that the bad actors are being forced out. A lot of people looked to gain a quick fortune by taking advantage of the incredible enthusiasm for cryptocurrency that was surging over the last couple of years. A lot of ICOs were founded on nothing more than a pipe dream and a lot of hype.

The end result of these growing pains is that the foundation for the success of Bitcoin and its virtual currency brethren will be incredibly strong. The parasites, hucksters, scammers, get-rich-quick dreamers, and such will be gone from the marketplace. In the end, the price of Bitcoin will eventually rise due to the law of supply and demand. There’s only a fixed amount of BTC available, and the demand for its use will continue to grow as the cryptocurrency ecosystem matures and is increasingly adopted.

Do you think BTC will have more consecutive months of losses? Are you hopeful about the future of cryptocurrency? Let us know in the comments below.

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