If there was one word that could describe bitcoin over the past year, it would be 'unpredictable'. So, with that in mind and armed with 20/20 hindsight at year's end, it's fun to go back and look at all the people who tried to do just that.

Whether they prognosticated over the entrails of dead animals or defunct bitcoin exchanges, actual data or emotional investment, the results were perhaps unsurprisingly often far off the mark.

Alarge majority of bitcoin fortune-tellers focused on whether the price would go stratospheric or tank, but other more thoughtful commentatorslooked at otheraspects of the digital currency ecosystem, such as venture investment, politics, or emergence of alternative currencies.

Let's look at what the pundits predicted for bitcoin in 2014.

Toput thisyear's price projectionsinto context, they were made at a time whenbitcoin's price had risen from under $100 to over $1,000 in a matter of months. Bitcoin had just emerged from Silk Road's shadow, its critics found themselves on mute, and positive media coverage meant even non-technological family members were beginning to ask about bitcoin.

Rather than make predictions ourselves, CoinDesk outsourced the task to readers with a poll right as the new year rolled in, and one bitcoin was worth $775.

The result was that 56% of the 5,500 respondents expected bitcoin's price to hit $10,000 before the end of the year. 31%, however, thought this unlikely and 13% responded "WTF are you smokin'?"

A Bank of America Merrill Lynch report in December 2013 said the bitcoin price "will stabilize around $1,300 per coin very soon".

Jason Hamlin of GoldStockBullpenned ahopeful visionof $1,800 gold, a pardon for Edward Snowden and bitcoins for "$2,500 or higher" in 2014.

To be fair, not everyone who made a prediction about bitcoin in the past 12 months did so with a definite timeframe in mind, like the Winklevoss brothers' vision of a $400bn bitcoin market cap... someday.

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Bitcoin Predictions for 2014: How the Pundits Fared