Staff at bitcoin exchange company CoinCorner reckon the controversial cryptocurrency is here to stay.
Bitcoin has rarely been out of the news in recent months.
A single bitcoin reached the giddy heights of nearly 20,000 dollars [almost £15,000) before plunging to a low of around 5,800 dollars [£4,200].
Last week the currency rallied again and on the day Business News visited CoinCorner in Prospect Hill, Douglas, the price had risen.
Danny Scott, 32, co-founded CoinCorner in 2014 in a bid to help people buy bitcoins more easily and has become a leading island advocate of the so-called cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is a digital payment system without a central administrator. Transations are recorded on a public ledger known as the blockchain.
Danny Scott, tech developer Liam Wiltshire, 25, marketing manager Molly Spiers, 25, and new recruit, marketing specialist Joanne Goldy, 26, sat down with Business News to predict they believe bitcoin could rise in value again this year.
Danny said: ’From the end of last year we had all been expecting a correction at some point. The correction slowly came, a cycle of good news, bad news, it kind of triggered a couple of different movements.’
The most recent news had been about various countries debating about whether to ban or regulate bitcoin.
And recently there had been some ’panic selling’ as the price was falling ’and that kind of turned into a snowball effect’ which kept the price coming down.
Danny said there now appeared to be a ’bounce back.’
He said bitcoin ’is here to stay and it’s not going away.
’I heard a quote which sums it up and goes along the lines of: ’’The tech genie is out of the bottle now and there’s no way to put it back in now.’’
’That’s a great way to describe it. The technology is out there now. It’s doing what it is doing and nobody is going to get rid of bitcoin.’
The team said they were used to fluctuations in price.
Liam said it had been ’quite mad’ over Christmas as the price soared.
Molly said: ’It’s another day in the [bitcoin] industry.’
Danny said: ’What we are saying in a nutshell is that we are used to this. It looks like a rollercoaster from the outside but inside we’ve seen this happen time and time.’
He agreed with Liam that there is a natural trajectory upwards but then there were the occasional spikes and corrections.
The company, which has been a finalist twice in the Isle of Man Newspapers Awards for Excellence, is firmly rooted in the island. And Danny said the strength of the commitment is shown in the fact that the business is looking to recruit more staff.
Here’s the team’s personal predictions as to the price of bitcoin by the end of the year:
lDanny: 40,000 dollars [nearly £29,000]
lLiam: 35,000 dollars [more than £25,300]
lMolly: 100,000 dollars [nearly £72,000]
lJoanne: up to 20,000 dollars [more than £14,000]
www.coincorner.com
Some members of the Coin Corner staff including Danny Scott, second from the right, next to Molly Spiers and Liam Wiltshire, centre