On Thursdsay (28 June 2018), Ran Neu-Ner, the founder of Onchain Capital, the host of CNBC Africa’s “Crypto Trader”, and one of the most influential people in the blockchain space, explained on CNBC’s “Fast Money” (hosted by Melissa Lee) why he believes Bitcoin (BTC) will go even lower within the next couple of weeks and why he remains bullish on the Cardano (ADA) and NEO (NEO) projects.
Neu-Ner, who had predicted on Fast Money on June 11th (when Bitcoin was around $6,860) Bitcoin’s drop to $5,900, was appearing on the show once again, this time with Bitcoin sitting at $5,915. He was asked what was next for Bitcoin. This was his reply:
Look, unfortunately, the same model that told us we are going to $5,900 is telling us there's more blood to come. It's calling a 62% chance of a bear market and a bear market means we are going to test $5,350 as the next point… There's about a 16% chance of a bull market, but to confirm the bull market, we then need to test $7,400 with high volume. So, right now, my money is on the market continuing to go down and going down to $5,350… and time horizon there is the next two weeks.
Lee then asked Neu-Ner how he thinks Bitcoin’s mining cost comes into play. He answered:
It's a huge factor, but what's going to happen is when the miners find it's not viable for them to mine, what they are going to do is switch off their machines, and there's going to be fewer machines in the ecosystem, and the machines that are left are going to continue to mine. So, we are at those levels. We received some notifications from some of the miners that they have already switched off their machines.
Hedge fund manager Brian Kelly then said to Neu-Ner that he didn’t believe that going below the production cost would have any impact on price since we were still going to get 12.5 BTC every 10 minutes, i.e. that the supply of Bitcoin would remain the same whether we had 100 miners or 2 miners. Neu-Ner said that the main impact would be that the miners who could not afford to continue mining would switch off their machines, which would mean that the “mining bounty” would be shared between fewer miners, thereby making mining viable again for those remaining miners. He also said that this would naturally lead to much less investment in new mining infrastructure.
Another hedge fund manager, Tim Seymour, then asked what was the best play at the moment. Neu-Ner said that it all depended on your time horizon: if you were a strong believer in blockchain technology and an investor with a long term outlook, now was a “great time” to be buying Bitcoin, but if you were a short-term trader, then based on his prediction of $5,350 within the next two weeks, you could take a short position.
Finally, Neu-Ner was asked what were the coins he was most bullish on at the moment. He said that he felt that infrastructure plays (i.e. platforms on which you could build the next generation of DApps) seemed to be “really undervalued”, and his favorite two projects in this area were NEO (what he called the “Chinese Ethereum”) and Cardano.
According to CryptoCompare, at press time, NEO is trading at $27.10 and at $0.1150.
You can watch the full video of this segment of Fast Money on the CNBC website.
Featured Image Credit: “Bitcoin Crypto Coin Stock Photo” by “Crypto360” via Flickr; licensed under “CC BY 2.0”
