Ross Ulbricht – the man who’s serving a life sentence for developing the notorious black marketplace Silk Road – is writing letters from prison and trying to guess where bitcoin’s price will head within the next year.
Ulbricht Tries to Tell Us Where BTC Will Go
According to Ulbricht’s latest letter, the world’s primary digital currency by market cap is set to reach $100,000 by the year 2020. Thus, he now joins figures such as Charles Hoskinson, Tim Draper and John McAfee to believe that the cryptocurrency will reach the six or seven-figure range within a relatively short period.
Ulbricht was first arrested in 2013. He was later sentenced to two life sentences – along with 40 additional years – in 2015 without the possibility of parole. The charges against him included money laundering, conspiracy to traffic narcotics through the internet and computer hacking. Many have expressed that the sentence facing Ulbricht is too harsh, and that the U.S. government is simply looking to make an example of him.
One of the primary staples of the Silk Road marketplace is that users could potentially purchase illicit goods such as guns and drug paraphernalia with bitcoin. At the time, bitcoin was widely associated with dark web use, as it was not a mainstream form of payment, though it has made significant progress in this area over the past year.
Silk Road operated via the Tor browser, which is focused on privacy and anonymity for its users. Bitcoin’s price also significantly changed between the time of Ulbricht’s arrest and his sentencing. During the former, BTC traded for well over $1,100, while during his arrest, the currency was suffering heavily from a two-year bear market that had brought it down to about $230.
But once you go bitcoin, you never go back, as we’re now witnessing with Ulbricht. Having spent the last four years in prison, it seems clear that the alleged drug runner cannot get crypto out of his head, and he predicts bitcoin will hit the six-figure mark as early as next year.
How Did He Guess This?
Ulbricht utilizes what’s known as the Elliott Wave Theory to arrive at his recent findings. As bitcoin hit almost $20,000 during wave three (which concluded during December 2017), he claims that wave five – which is about to strike – should take the currency up to the $100,000 level. He writes:
If the $20,000 peak is the end of wave three, then the correction pattern we are in (or just came out of) is wave four, and we can expect wave five to take us to new all-time highs… Bitcoin did not appear in a vacuum. It was a solution to a problem that cryptographers had been struggling with for many years – how to create digital money with no central authority that couldn’t be forged and could be trusted.
