Tom Lee, co-founder of Fundstrat and our favorite Bitcoin analyst, recently went back on CNBC’s Fast Money to speak about his favorite topic: Bitcoin price. If you recall, we previously wrote about Lee’s pre-Consensus claims that Bitcoin’s end-of-the-year price will be somewhere around $25 thousand USD. He recently adjusted his prediction by saying that Bitcoin will in fact be somewhere around $20 thousand by the end of the year. His latest comments had many people call him out as bearish, as he suddenly decided to abandon his previous prediction.
When asked about his redefined views during an appearance on CNBC’s Fast Money, Lee avoided a direct answer by saying that he still struggles to understand how someone can interpret what is essentially a “Bitcoin will triple in value” comment as a bearish one. Immediately after, Lee suggested that he based his predictions on the fact that Bitcoin has a history of following a certain end of the year price trend.
Namely, Lee claims that both predictions were based on the fact that one Bitcoin has historically been around 2.5 times more expensive than the cost of mining that same coin was. Therefore, he maintained that his prediction isn’t more bearish at all and claimed that his initial estimate was somewhere between 20 and 25 thousand.
“I may have misspoken a little bit – What I was trying to illustrate was that given where mining costs will be and applying the historical average of 2.5 times mining costs, that would imply fair value over $20,000, roughly $22,000,” his full statement said.
And while his new prediction implies a slightly more negative sentiment towards the market, Lee maintained that $25k is still more than reachable. After saying that Bitcoin did just recently increase from $7 thousand to $10 thousand USD in just a couple of weeks, Lee suggested that the currency is traded under its mining costs value and has historically shown significant gains whenever such a ratio was reached. Lee built upon his mining costs/price argument by saying the following:
“The reason Bitcoin looks really good here is the cost of mining around $7,000 fully loaded. And the difficulty is rising. So by the end of the year, it’s going to be $9,000.”
He does concede that the time frame in which this recovery can happen is slowly shrinking. However, he remained true to his data and concluded his analysis by saying:
“The challenge is, of course, that Bitcoin is quite volatile and it has a 10 year history, but it’s always been a good time to buy below mining costs.”
