Bitcoin will be a different animal in 2018

Anyone who has been watching the bitcoin price this month is well acquainted with how much its value has appreciated. As of writing this article, its price is hovering around $16000 USD. My prediction is the price will be 20k easily by the end of December 2017. The volume has increased across all exchanges, and the price and market cap keep soaring up. Last night it took some users 6 hours on Coinbase to transfer bitcoin out of the exchange wallet to get confirmations for their transfers. Coinbase is experiencing very large amount traffic on Bitcoin transactions as the website disclaimers posted on the user's account. The question is why is Bitcoin value soaring so high now? wasn't it a few weeks back that Bitcoin was taking heavy hard punches from its clone twin brother Bitcoin Cash. It seems like a distant memory in the past when the mining community had shifted their mining hash power to Bitcoin Cash when the news broke out that Bitcoin segwit2x was canceled. Bitcoin survived the fight with Bitcoin Cash and it is now the undisputed King. The price for Bitcoin is rising because the whales are coming, or as Mike Novogratz puts it "The herd is coming". CME and CBOE's are launching institutional investment for Bitcoin. Bitcoin next year will be a different animal where millions of dollars will be poured in by the big boys. Some have speculated this month may be the last month to get Bitcoin at a bargain price hence people are in a rush buying it now. It is the digital gold rush.

Now, this may seem all nice for investors but is Bitcoin's code architecture durable enough to handle the herd that is the big question? Something has to happen for Bitcoin's codebase for it to be able to scale and handle large volume of transactions. Bitcoin's code has to evolve for it to survive and maintain value next year in 2018.