With Bitcoin still far from its all time high price near $20,000 this post will be all about speculation and hypothetical. Currently the price of Bitcoin is sitting near $8,800 (04/26/2018). The last time it was at its all time high was in December of 2017. Four months later we have seen a rapid fall in prices across the board in the cryptocurrency space. So what would happen if Bitcoin broke through its all time high?
1) First of all, alt coins would skyrocket.
The prices of alt coins have fallen harder than Bitcoin has. For example, the price of Ripple fell from an all time high of around $3 all the way down to the 47 cent range. I'm not saying that Ripple will return to $3 if Bitcoin breaks $20,000 but I'm sure Ripple will increase in value from its price today of 80 cents. It's hard to say where Ripple would end up, but a strong Bitcoin could bring along the rest of the market to test their all time highs as well.
Ripple is just an example. The large majority of alt coins would greatly increase in price as Bitcoin does as well. Currently, the health of the crypto market is largely based on the strength of Bitcoin.
2) Mining would become much more profitable.
Going off of the second point, an increase in prices would result in greater profitability for miners. Mining profitability is largely tied to both the difficulty and the prices of the coin. Monero, for example, recently saw a huge drop in mining difficulty as a hardfork in the blockchain's protocol eliminated ASICs. This saw a spike in profitability in mining the coin which was gone rather quickly as other miners switched to mine Monero. The other way to increase profitability is if the coin is simply worth more. With the recent dips in prices mining profitability has taken a big hit. If Bitcoin were to push past it's ATH, the rest of the market will be more profitable to mine as their prices get pushed up as well.
Here is an absolutely great article on Bitcoin's past ATH's and how long it took to break: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@penguinpablo/how-long-will-it-take-for-bitcoin-to-reach-usd20-000-again
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