Picture Gallery: Bitcoin investors' immediate target would be to get prices back to $45,000 levels

Even as Bitcoin went through its price zoom-and-drop since January, there was one steady note struck amidst all that. This was governments saying that Bitcoin’s free ride as an unregulated asset will soon be over. If at all Bitcoin was to have a future, it would be by getting co-opted into the mainstream.

Can Bitcoin investors live with all that extra scrutiny that is coming their way? No longer is the debate about whether governments will tie down the asset with all manner of rules, but when. Whether it is the US or China, the EU or India, crypto transactions are going to feature on the regulator’s radar.

Under such external pressures, will Bitcoin investors fixate purely on transactions – and Bitcoin prices? In the last few weeks, the $39,000-$41,000 range is what prices have been bound to.

According to Khurram Shroff, a Bitcoin investor who joined the crypto movement early, “The next big target, for the crypto community to keep an eye on is for BTCUSD is to clear the $44,500 mark, where another key technical resistance lies.”

Investors will not mind that – anything as long as prices push firmly over that sensitive $40,000 barrier. Anything under that level rises the risk of a stumble to the $30,000 threshold. At this point in the crypto’s evolution, investors will want to avoid that.

It has been that kind of year for the asset, April 14’s unprecedented peak of $64,000 plus, and then just when it seemed that $100,000 was within reach, the drop to sub-$30,000.

But for every Bitcoin holder’s dismay, the drop represented an opportunity for another investor to get in. “The 50 per cent retracement from the $60,000+ all-time high was perfectly normal,” said Fred Pye, CEO and Chairman 3iQ Corp. which listed its Bitcoin fund on Nasdaq Dubai recently. “There was a good two-month period where low 30,000 accumulations were possible.”

The Bitcoin stumble has taken down other cryptos too. “The correlation between Bitcoin and other altcoins will not cease to be looked at, or studied, for the time being,” said Shroff. “There’s a reason we refer to it as the ‘crypto ecosystem’. Each coin plays an important role in affecting factors such as the greater adoption of cryptocurrencies, the development of more diverse applications for altcoins, and so forth. As the market matures even more, there will be less of a generalized association of market sentiment with cryptocurrency. Investors will begin to back specific preferences, within the basket of available altcoins.”

The ongoing US corporate results haven’t provided any major revelations about adoption of Bitcoin. Much was made of Amazon likely to do so, but the e-tailing giant soon nipped such incipient talk. Elon Musk keeps talking up and down Bitcoin prospects, and prices gyrate with each of his assertions.

Will it need another Musk pronouncement to get Bitcoin up to $45,000 and over? Investors wait in anticipation…