We often draw projections of growth with straight lines, although straight lines rarely occur in nature. As the growth of BTC takes on a steeper incline as network effects take hold, a curve may be a more accurate way to represent it's growth.
I could see a massive correction down into the $3-4K zone if we see the collapse of Bitfinex and Tether which seems probable, which would shake out all the weak hands and give a huge buying opportunity.
There are a lot of very fresh people into Crypto who impatiently sell their coins back and forth, and who don't understand what's happening behind the scenes, and they buy into market manipulation. Bitcoin Cash has gained from impatient trader's frustration, though ultimately it's a lost cause and BCH represents absolutely no existential threat to BTC. The whole death spiral analogy is just a dark fantasy, and in reality every course it could take would not manifest, as by any measure the transaction fees in a BTC log jam would out-weight the BCH block reward. If you think of an scenario in which a Death Spiral could actually occur please leave it in the comments, I have not considered every possibility, though it doesn’t seem feasible.
There are a lot of day traders in here who see BCH as a great money making opportunity, or even an auspicious pairing with BTC, looking at the historical charts, that is true. Though how many people actually want to settle into BCH? It’s obvious that BCH is a bandage on the scaling issue, and contrary to the propaganda, actually forces itself to be centralized. Anybody who runs their own full node or who develops blockchain apps can easily understand this. BCH will hit a very hard and absolute wall when the 8MB blocks are filled with frivolous transactions, and everybody who bought into BCH based on ideology will be forced back onto BTC. In a future where BCH maxes at around 56 transactions per second and is slowing to a crawl, BTC and ETH will be going strong with millions of transactions per second, consuming one country after the next.
BTC is also the most sophisticated PoW cryptocurrency by far. Is it slow? Yes, because the demand is so high. If there was this much demand on ANY other blockchain it would be equally slow and expensive.
Bitcoin and Ethereum on the other hand are working on multi-layered scaling solutions which will allow for thousands even millions of transactions per second. The way it works is with payment channels on sidechains, or in the case of ETH it's shards and other methods they are developing, which are validated on side chains, so even if Lightning allows for only 2-4x settlement throughput to the main blockchain, side chains only need to settle in increments. BTC Core and the Ethereum team are taking on Visa, Mastercard and Interac - if you can't understand the true scaling issue at hand and are betting on BCH long term, spend 1 BTC and get your head checked by a real blockchain developer, and you’ll easily make that back by staying in BTC.
With the reality that SegWit 2x was a failed scam and attempted coup of BTC by corporate powers, the true nature of the beast has shown itself. Corporations and governments can try and censor and centralize Bitcoin all they want, though Hodlers couldn't care less about transactions times, the point of hodling is digital gold. The original vision of Satoshi's digital cash is taking form on side-chains which settle onto the main block, so both applications of Bitcoin will be feasible within BTC without compromise. Stay on-chain for higher transaction fees, or go off-chain for quicker and cheaper transactions, it's your Bitcoin, it's your choice. Technically, this is the only way to keep the full node at a manageable size so that everybody can do on-chain validation on a Macbook Pro and keep it decentralized.
At this rate, with one unmitigated victory after the next for BTC, it's easy to see 20K Bitcoin by the end of 2018. #100%Speculation #ThisIsNotInvestmentAdvice #HodlOrDie