Tom Lee: 2020 Will Be a Big Year for Bitcoin

Bitcoin bull and leading Fundstrat analyst Tom Lee claims that the “crypto winter” is now over and users can expect to see new “all-time highs” for bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies in the year 2020.

Bitcoin first exploded to $20,000 by the end of 2017. From there, it entered a long period of decline that saw it lose roughly 80 percent of its overall value by the end of 2018. This lasted for another five months before the currency finally recovered somewhat in early April 2019.

There are still plenty of steps to take, however, if the currency is going to spike into the five-figure range yet again. Thankfully, Lee says the time to take those steps is right around the corner.

In a recent interview, the longstanding crypto bull claimed:

Last year was a terrible year for crypto, a massive bear market, and we published a piece this week just highlighting… 11 signs that historically only take place in a bull market. So, I think the evidence is mounting that there’s a bull market.

It’s difficult not to take these words with a grain of salt. While Lee is very respected in the crypto space, his predictions for bitcoin have not always been fully realized. For example, despite the consistent price drops of 2018, Lee was very adamant that bitcoin would ultimately reach $25,000 by the end of the year. He later lowered his predictions to $20,000 and $15,000 respectively, but all the while, crypto continued to incur further price falls.

By the end of 2018, bitcoin failed to reach even $4,000, and Lee issued a statement saying that his company would no longer work to predict bitcoin’s price, but rather simply analyze the factors that were potentially affecting it.

In other words, “I was wrong and I’m too embarrassed to say it, so let me focus your attention this way.”

At the same time, Lee did predict a massive bull rally for bitcoin in March 2019, and that prediction has been coming true as of late, so perhaps there’s some skill to what he does.

It’s hard to know for sure if Lee is right this time around, though he’s joined by other respected members of the space such as venture capitalist Tim Draper in his claims that the 2020 decade will be huge for bitcoin. Draper recently doubled down on his 2022 bitcoin prediction, claiming one unit will likely be worth $250,000 during that year.

Lee says that one of the big things helping bitcoin right now is increased usage in Turkey and Venezuela. He claims:

Just taking those two countries, they’re close to 30 percent of the increase in on-chain activity, so that’s meaningful. People are saying, ‘Look, I don’t trust using these local currencies. I don’t trust the banks. I’m going to start using bitcoin,’ and that’s what’s causing on-chain volume to really take off.