After floating in the lower $4,000s for months, bitcoin recently spiked up beyond the $5,000 mark, attracting investors’ attention. Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency that gets a lot of attention in the financial world owing to its price volatility. The asset price could shoot up on a given day but on the very next day it could fall down on its knees. . With this spike, many are trying to guess whether it will go further up or not. Depending upon the price behavior, investors and general public might buy more bitcoins, or refrain from it.

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Proponents of bitcoins such as John McAfee, the famous cybersecurity expert and businessman, believe that the asset is worth much more than its current price. Talking to the co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital Anthony Pompliano on his podcast “Off the Chain”, McAfee said :

I don’t care if its a penny today, it’s going to be 2 million dollars very soon…What’s happening in the market has nothing to do with the reality of its value.

Over the years, experts have voiced their wild predictions regarding the asset’s price. Some turned out to be correct while others proved to be utterly wrong. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian‘s last year’s predictions of bitcoin hitting $20,000 by year’s end also turned out to be wrong. But price fluctuation does not necessarily represent the value of an asset. Although the price is not growing much, its value is still growing as developments and regulations are being made in this space. As said by Alexis:

“As volatile as it’s been, we see it continuing [to go] up over the long term because more and more people are going to look for alternatives to fiat as a store of value as we see currency fluctuations with states failing and other uncertainty that make having a digital store of value like bitcoin something that’s desirable, because you don’t have to worry about withdrawing it from a bank or the value disappearing as a government money.”

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With the asset’s value increasing, here is a recap of what some of the experts are saying about what the value of bitcoin may be by the end of the year:

After a long bear market, we will see some life come back on the heels of increasing regulatory certainty and adoption. At year’s end, I see Bitcoin at $8200.” – Kyle Asman, Co-founder and Partner at BX3 Capital

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“I believe the bull market has kicked in in the crypto space and the price of bitcoin will finish the year around $10,000.” – Henry Stanley, Chief Executive Officer ICOAxiom.”

André Bruckman, CEO and Founder of Mycro even went a step further by predicting bitcoin to touch $50,000.

The industry is bigger than ever, it is more professional, more serious and the image has improved. The next run will come and this time it will be more intense than ever. BTC represents the whole industry and I am very bullish on it. I think there will be another correction and from there I see $50,000 as possible in 2019.

While these predictions have been somewhat bullish, there are also some experts who believe that the asset does not deserve this much price value:

“I think there are very serious problems for bitcoin right now. Bitmain posted over half a billion dollars in losses in their most recent financials. If miners aren’t making any money, we’re going to see the hashrate drop, which could make 51% attacks possible. We’ve already seen some of the smaller chains suffer from this. If the security of the network and the miner’s ability to generate cash flow are both imperiled, then there is really a limited incentive for end users to buy in. And that means we won’t have the capital flows necessary to support a $5,000 price. I can see BTC dropping well below the $3000 level if things continue as they have been.” – Nash Foster, Chief Executive Officer Pyrofex .

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“There is no rational way to forecast the price of bitcoin at the end of 2019 as one can’t apply the tools of traditional finance to bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to arrive at the intrinsic value (or true value) of the supposed asset. Investing in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is pure, unadulterated speculation. I put investing in parentheses because this is not investing, it is speculating. There is no way to value cryptocurrencies other than the greater fool theory — the hope that some greater fool will pay you more than you paid. It is the consummate bubble and investors should stay far away from cryptocurrencies, in general, and bitcoin specifically. Cryptocurrencies are the Tulipmania of the 21st century. While one can’t forecast the price of bitcoin in the short run, I am confident that in the long run the price will be near zero.” – Robert R. Johnson, PhD, CFA, CAIA, Professor of Finance, Heider College of Business, Creighton University .

It is hard to predict bitcoin’s price with the kind of volatility that it displays. It can gain or lose its value by thousands of dollars in a matter of days. With these predictions in sight, it will be interesting to see what happens to this asset as we reach the year’s end.

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