Bitcoin (BTC) retains two of its best-known proponents, but one has cooled its BTC price forecasts considerably.
In an interview with CNBC on June 9, Tom Lee, co-founder of independent research firm Fundstrat, revealed that he was unsure if BTC/USD would end the year above its starting price.
Lee suggests market has “already bottomed”
Bitcoin price projections for 2022 have plummeted as macro pressures combine with black swan events such as the Terra implosion to send sentiment to near record lows.
While many argue that a capitulation event will enter in the coming months to send BTC/USD to $20,000 or under, Lee believes that underlying strength is worth paying attention to now.
“It’s a risk-on asset, so I think to the extent that Nasdaq and Bitcoin rally, it’s helping us become more comfortable that the market’s already bottomed,” he told CNBC’s CB Overtime segment.
At the same time, Lee brushed off the Terra debacle and redundancies at major crypto companies including United States exchange Coinbase, saying that Bitcoin was “acting far better than people expect.”
When asked where BTC price action was headed by the start of 2023 — even if correlated stock markets put in gains — the response was less optimistic.
“I think Bitcoin’s going to make its way to flat for the year, possibly up,” he concluded.
Lee was previously famous for his bullish takes on Bitcoin, among which was a prediction of $200,000 for 2022 made shortly after the latest all-time high of $69,000 last November.
Saylor on BTC: “If it’s not going to zero, it’s going to a million”
Meanwhile, unapologetically bullish was MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, whose own comments to mainstream media firmly brushed aside any suggestion of permanent price downside.
Related: BTC price gains 4% pre-Fed as MicroStrategy vows to protect Bitcoin from $21K crash
Those who claimed that Bitcoin would be banned or go to zero, he told CNBC on June 8, had already been “discredited.”
“If the deniers are wrong and the skeptics are wrong — and it’s pretty obvious they’re both wrong at this point — it’s not going to zero, and if it’s not going to zero, it’s going to a million,” Saylor forecast.
While nothing new, Saylor being “very bullish on where we go from here” increasingly grates with the downbeat perspective on risk assets across the board in the new era of central bank monetary tightening.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, some believe that it will take until the next block subsidy halving in 2024 for a meaningful price recovery to enter.
Saylor, meanwhile, said that when it comes to buying more BTC for its existing reserves, there was no point in “timing the market.”
“We’re kind of doing the equivalent of dollar cost averaging for a large corporation,” he explained:
“We’re not trying to time the market; I think all the statistics on the S&P and on the Bitcoin index show you can’t time the market. We’re just reinvesting free cash flows in the market as circumstances allow us.”
BTC/USD traded at around $30,500 at the time of writing on June 9, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.
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