In a day that has become typical of the contrast around bitcoin news, one analyst is predicting that the price of bitcoin will rise to as much $400,000, while an actual bitcoin expert has sold his holdings, saying that the cryptocurrency is now “as good as useless.”

Starting on the positive side of the blockchain ledger, serial bitcoin price predictor Ronnie Moas, the founder of Standpoint Research, is now claiming that bitcoin will eventually hit as high as $400,000. “The end-game on bitcoin is that it will hit $300,000 to $400,000 in my opinion, and it will be the most valuable currency in the world,” Moas told CNBC.

Justifying Moas’ alleged expertise in predicting the price of bitcoin, Forbes reports that Moas “accurately predicted the surge in Bitcoin in June” before adding that “Moas predicted Bitcoin would hit $5,000 by the end of the year.” Bitcoin is currently trading at about $19,000. In other words, finding a random person, putting a blindfold on him and then asking him to throw a dart at a board of bitcoin price predictions may actually come closer to predicting the price of bitcoin than Moas did in June.

On the negative side of the blockchain ledger, Emil Oldenburg, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Bitcoin.com, has sold off his bitcoin because he believes the future isn’t as rosy as the likes of Moas predict.

”I would say an investment in bitcoin is right now the riskiest investment you can make. There’s an extremely high risk,” Oldenburg said in an interview published in Sweden last week. “When I sold my BTC I had to pay 50 dollars and wait 12 hours for the transaction to go through because of this. It’s completely unreasonable.”

Oldenburg added that he had instead switched his investment holdings to Bitcoin Cash, the alternative coin created earlier this year as a fork from bitcoin by those who believed that the way bitcoin transactions are processed needed to change. The difference between bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash comes down to the size of the block used to process transactions. Bitcoin is constrained by a small block size, whereas Bitcoin Cash uses a larger one, meaning that the latter’s transactions are quicker and cost less.

The price of Bitcoin Cash rose in trading Monday, up 21 percent for the 24 hours ending at 10:30 p.m. EST. The price of bitcoin remained somewhat steady, floating at around the $18,800 mark throughout the day as bitcoin futures continue to have a stabilizing influence on bitcoin’s price.

Photo: Pnut10/Wikimedia Commons