Bitcoin Forum

At the time of writing BTC is currently sitting at $7,572 – a 6.9% decline over the last 24 hours. Other market leaders like Ethereum and EOS have also seen declines in the region of 4-6%. One notable stand-out performer in this downward market cycle is Binance's native token. BNB token has held strong posting a gain of 0.75%. This is nothing spectacular but it is nice to see a bit of green in a sea of red.

Typically when the market does behave like this, exchange tokens like BNB, KCS, COSS...etc outperform the market. For the sake of this explanation, we will refer solely to the Binance exchange token – BNB.

During bear cycles traders exit BTC and ALT’s to enter fiat, Tether or exchange tokens. The additional fee’s and potential tax implications associated with entering and exiting fiat are a deterrent. Likewise, entering Tether has its own drawbacks too, namely the sacrifice of potential USD gains that could be made by holding something that has a fluctuating value.

The one that remains is BNB which is a dividend paying exchange token from arguably the most trusted exchange in cryptocurrency today - Binance. Historically BNB outperforms the market in bear cycles, allowing traders to mitigate their losses on their long positions or swing trade and make some nice gains.

In times like these, we sometimes employ a strategy wherby we Tether 50% and enter BNB with the other 50% of the funds produced when exiting our BTC and ALT positions. In addition to opening shorts, this strategy allows us to diversify some degree of risk out of our portfolio. Risk management is job number one for any serious trader, no matter what type of market you are in.  This is a mentality lost on many cryptocurrency traders but is a discipline we bring from trading traditional markets like FOREX.

It is important to remember why markets behave the way that they do. We have just witnessed a long period of sustained growth, albeit slow growth in crypto time, but growth nonetheless. There always has to be a correction that follows periods of growth and that is what we are witnessing right now.

As the saying goes “you take the stairs up and the elevator down”. It is always amusing to see the dramatic overreactions of others during corrections like these, many claiming the sky is falling. Just like every time winter rolls around, people are amazed at how cold it is – memory is selective, we only want to remember the good times.

Our previous stops set at $7,750 were hit and we are now retesting some strong support at $7,500. If we break this support we may very well drop below $7,000 again although we would expect some support at the $7,200 level. We will continue to monitor how this move plays out and will be keeping tight stops on our BNB position.

Interesting observations. I wonder whether the opposite is true. Do BNB and the other exchange tokens go down during bullish markets?

BTC is currently sitting at the $7560 mark and is down approximately 2% since our last TA update.

Selling pressure is weighing down on the overall BTC market however, we did see a strong rebound at the $7480 level.

As can be seen from the chart, this level has historically been a strong resistance level and is now acting as a support.

We’re expecting price to come down and retest the $7,480 level – we will be watching closely for signs of strength at this point and may enter long depending on the price action.

Of course, it is entirely possible that price slips down further to the $7,200 level. - beyond this we could likely be exposed to the low $6,000 levels.

We’re not certain at this point and CIM is happy to be watching from the sidelines. As always, we will be sure to keep you updated with our views.

keep in touch

BREAKING: OWNER OF THE NYSE TO BEGIN BTC TRADING

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), owner of the NYSE has announced that it will list a physically settled BTC contract.

ICE had previously hinted that they were exploring BTC trading in New York but nothing was clear cut.

Their new BTC platform named Bakkt has been in development partnered with the likes of Microsoft and Starbucks.

This story is still breaking but it should be seen as good news, allowing more money to flow into cryptocurrency.

There is no telling what effect this news will have as it may well already be baked into the price.
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Grinding up

BTC is currently on a slow grind up within the current consolidation zone between $7,500 and $7,250.

We’re currently printing higher lows as we march towards the 0.236 fib level but it would not surprise us to see a bearish retreat and retest of $7,265 level as we could potentially be in a bear flag pattern. 

We would view any break and close below $7,200 as a shorting opportunity to around the $6,860 level.

On the other hand, if we witness some convincing buy volume at the $7,200 mark, we would consider going long with targets as high as $7,800 but more conservatively, would look at possibly exiting at $7740 or even $7,520 depending on the bullish momentum.

BTC E-Commerce use tumbles
BTC e-commerce use has fallen 85% from $411m last September to a low of $60m in May this year. This rapid decline gives us an interesting look into one of the factors that preceded and followed the bull market run at the end of last year.

Firstly let’s consider some of the factors that would have contributed to this decline. The most prominent being the transaction cost. BTC has been notoriously bad at scaling resulting in absurdly high transaction costs. High transaction costs and transaction cost volatility simply do not make BTC a viable form of currency.

Speaking about volatility, since last September BTC has risen from $4,000 to $20,000 then back down to $7,000 today. Price volatility is also a major problem for vendors as they may charge $50 in BTC for goods on Monday and that amount of BTC could be worth $30 by Wednesday.
Payment companies like Stripe removed BTC payment as an option in January of this year claiming that transactions were too slow and too expensive. This is seemingly a move in response to difficulty experienced by the BTC network during periods of high volume.

This 85% decline is no cause for concern as these issues with the BTC network can and will be solved with innovative scaling solutions, the lightning network is a good start. One noteworthy consideration is the paradigm shift from BTC being a currency to BTC being a store of value.
With this new categorisation of BTC came new innovative cryptocurrency solutions well equipped to handle the scaling issues that BTC could not. Tokens such as Nano or Fantom which are built on DAG network architecture can facilitate hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with no transaction fees. These new high speed and low cost alternatives are still in their infancy however.
E-commerce usage of BTC may have dropped but it has been transferred elsewhere to tokens built for the purpose of acting as a currency. The river will flow through the path of least resistance.  :D

ICE Bullish on BTC
Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the NYSE, who we wrote about earlier this week, has explained the rationale behind their announcement earlier this week, “Bitcoin has the potential to become the first worldwide currency and we're trying to make that happen” – a quote from Jeffrey Sprecher, founder of the Intercontinental Exchange.

Korean Exchange Bump
Some positive news out of Korea, UpBit has been officially cleared of the fraud which they were investigated for earlier this year. Bithumb has also announced that they will now have fiat on ramps for BTC, ETH, ETC, XRP, LTC, BCH, ZEC, QTUM & MITH. This is a great move in the right direction making it easier for Korean investors to trade between fiat and cryptocurrency.

We are still in a bear cycle, typified by the downward movement in price, even in light of this positive news coming from New York and Korea. However, we view this as a great opportunity to get our hands on some undervalued BTC and Altcoins. Right now we are waiting for the correct time to enter and will be bringing you some TA shortly with potential levels for entry.

#CAVEAT

The market is red and it is not good but also good.Red means there are discounts and you can buy more. And if we break through 7500 dollars and go to 7000 dollars it is not fatal,I expect growth in a moment it seems to me for a week the market will come to a trillion capitalization .

One could not really understand what is happened in the market and it seems everybody are selling and few are holding.  If this downwards trend continue we may have a very bad day in days to come.  I hope the $7,000 area hold as from tomorrow.

DOWN TREND CONTINUATION?


BTC is continuing to grind down lower no matter what positive news is thrown our way.

Looking at the 1H chart, we can see another sell off occurring which reaffirms (not that there was much doubt) that the bearish continuation is set to resume.

We’re cracking the second bear flag now and if we breach $6,910, may consider shorting down to the $6,770 level but possibly beyond depending on the play.

These aren’t big moves by any stretch, but it is better to play it safe in times of uncertainty. We will be watching closely at the $6,770 level which is the next major resistance zone.

Interesting theory regarding the outperformance of the coins like BNB and COSS etc which are used for the exchanger fee discounts and other features. I am not sure how true it is that they get spiked in such period because that is not the case always I see here. One of the reason that I might think about it is BNB getting used heavily for the transactions that are rising since bitcoin is crashing and people are trying to sell off everything in the want that they will earn more bitcoin. Thus net effect is on the tokens like BNB which are predominantly used to decrease the trade fees. This is just one of the theory according to me. It could be wrong or true.

Slowly but surely

BTC has cracked through the second flag albeit with much lower sell volume. On the 1H, we are witnessing a break of the $6,919 resistance line however, this candle is still open so anything could happen.

We are slowly grinding down lower through this shorting zone and It is looking increasingly more likely than not that we will be heading down to lower levels as  mentioned in our previous updates.
BTC

BTC POPS

BTC has popped roughly 3% from the $6,910 level and is nearing the most recent high of $7,129 on the 1H.

Whilst we did break the $6,910 level, the bulls have succeeded in propelling BTC higher after price collided with the previous $6,836 wick high as outlined on the chart.

We must admit, we were expecting price to sink a little lower and hit the $6,770 level however, we’re still ahead of the game and are not letting perfect get in the way of good.
I didn’t play this long trade but we’re looking intently at the price action to plan our next move accordingly.  As always, I will keep you all posted.

A lot of negative people criticizing the state of the crypto market.  We are at 7k a bitcoin, that is a massive amount compared to a few years ago.  We should be more optimistic about how far bitcoin has come and not be crying about the drop from 20k.

A 6% bloodbath? I remember $32 down to $2. A drop of over 90% is a bloodbath in BTC.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you :'(

If we were only half right the last time then we were ten times right this time.

The bulls put in a solid effort but it was becoming increasingly obvious after the $7,129 resistance could not be breached that we would be resuming the downtrend and returning to lower levels.

We can’t lay claim to the fact that we saw it dropping all the way down to $6,377 in one aggressive move, but we did foresee a drop coming.

With our short position opened at $6,850 now closed off at around $6,621, we’re certainly not complaining! 👍

For those of you who followed  – congratulations and nicely done.

Though I think it was helpful with your analogy, the title of the thread doesnt suit the current situation. This is not bloodbath and I think it will happen when the BTC reaches its all time high again sometimes in the future.

That makes everyone relief isn't it.  :D

Its not the figures that really matters but the % drops which decides what kind of bloodbath it is exactly. I am sure there are more people like you who has seen worst bloodbath like that and where the % drop was more than 90% because at that time the values were too less and they could have been easily manipulated to any price they wanted to. Currently the crypto is far safer because it is too costly too fluctuate it artificially and move the prices as the way they want. It can be done but not on huge scale so people should understand that its not that bad currently.

It was horrible considering the % term drop from 32 to 2$. But current situation is totally different and it is not termed as bloodbath. A small correction in process but should be good in coming time and soon we will see the btc regain its 8k position soon and thing will be more form the investors perspective.

Most people that are trading last year or those traders really stops. Bitcoin is undergoing a bloodbath until now. And I don't know when it will regain its position for us to win trades and so get our money back for reds. Bitcoin will stay at the red side, that's the truth. So, just hodl til the etf is confirmed.

🚨🚨 https://www.coingecko.com/en

The bitcoin price is back to 6500 USD.Is this a "bloodbath"?Let's hope that the support level is around 6000 dollars.I would think about a bloodbath only if bitcoin price goes under 3000 USD.There's no room for hysteria.Just HODL and relax.I don't care about the ICE launch.Everything that Wall Street does about bitcoin adoption will eventually hurt bitcoin.OP,don't be so optimisitic about the Intercontinental exchange.

Can't remember which media site used a really gruesome picture around the time of this OP, too. By then of course I'd already been desensitised to this overused "bloodbath" phrase, but I keep wondering why people don't use phrases of similar impact when BTC spikes about the same too (6%) to its most recent high. Had BTC truly dropped to this year's low within a week of its ATH, then yeah sure, I'd be okay with all the bloody references. People still haven't lost their appetites for hyperbole it seems.


Not sure if I'm reading well, but this thread stopped out all the trades. So why are you congratulating anyone who followed? =p Also, you said BNB historically outperforms in bear cycles but BNB has only really been around long enough to experience 1 bull and 1 bear cycle, hasn't it?

I do not fully understand what is going on but the situation on the market drives me crazy and cause me to seriously think whatever I will just sell everything I haven't quit for some time? Until the prices will recover...

Good point, we haven't seen a true bloodbath yet, even falling from 20k to 6k is nothing in comparison to 90% drop.

It now seems evident that we are clearly in a wave 3 down which would mean the relief rally from 5800-8470 was a corrective ABC in nature, meaning that once this 5 wave down structure is complete, it is only the beginning of a larger correction and not the end.

We want to point out that We have no intention of buying the ensuing wave 4 but only looking to short any strength, preferably in the 6.6-6.7k region.

It is no secret we have been calling for an end of bear market target at 3.2k which has been brought up a few times before.

Whether this happens or not is trivial as we are active traders, and trade what we see, which in this current climate, there are not too many bull cases to be made.

ETF Delay
By now I’m sure a lot of you would have felt the sting of the market’s overreaction to the SEC announcement of delaying the VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF decision. The ETF is backed by the Chicago Board of Exchange BZX Equities Exchange (CBOE) and has been praised by the cryptocurrency community for its efforts in attracting institutional investment into the budding blockchain industry.

The Commission explained that the Securities Exchange Act provides that it can extend the 45 days period from publication if it finds it “appropriate to designate a longer period” so it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change.

“Accordingly, the Commission, pursuant to Section 19(b)(2) of the Act designates September 30, 2018, as the date by which the Commission shall either approve or disapprove, or institute proceedings to determine whether to disapprove, the proposed rule change.”

This move by the SEC is a positive sign in the opinion of the CIM team as it shows that the SEC is seriously considering the ETF application. The gears of bureaucracy are grinding away, they only way they know how – slowly. The SEC could have disregarded VanEck-SolidX BTC ETF application and focused their valuable time elsewhere, but instead they chose to allot more time to this matter. Think about that before you decide to panic sell.

Prominent CNBC crypto commentator Brian Kelly said “If you’re selling today after this decision, it’s the wrong way to do crypto investing. There is more to this story than just an ETF, A little spoiler alert: On September 30th, they will likely postpone it again because the market’s not ready for it and the SEC hasn’t had all the answers to their questions yet.” One of the more lucid comments to come out of the CNBC studio.

Other Numbers
We recently reported on the decline in cryptocurrency spending noting that it had dropped over 80% in the past year. Today the DEA came out and announced a 90% drop in the usage of cryptocurrencies in illicit black market trades. This may very well just be the DEA tooting their own proverbial horn but it would certainly explain some of the decrease in crytpocurrency spending. If the numbers are assumed to be correct then there has actually been an increase in the usage of BTC and other cryptocurrencies in e-commerce.

OTC brokerage firms have said that although volumes are down in cryptocurrency order books, the OTC market is still flourishing. Some OTC desks have estimated that OTC volume makes up at least 50% of the daily cryptocurrency volume traded daily. One of the reasons traders use OTC brokers is the expediency they offer to execute a trade, paid for in the form of a seller’s discount.
A reasonable barometer on the sentiment of sellers can be the amount of discount they offer on their trades. In March of this year sellers were offering discounts in the order of 7-8%, indicating the urgency with which they needed to get rid of their BTC. At the moment the discount rate is sitting at about 2%, a stark improvement from the situation in March.

The current situation seems to be better than March however, we are still in a bearish market and the discount rate could very well rise again. As such we are approaching with caution.

In the likely situation of another ETF delay the current bear trend could linger around for a while like a bad smell. As previously stated we will be shorting strength and diversifying risk out of our portfolio by going long on BNB too.

Prepare for the unexpected

BTC bounced just shy of the 23-fib level and will as expected, continue its downward trajectory further. We’ll be keeping our eyes set on a few key levels as we make our descent - we could be in for a bit of turbulence.

As price nears $6,265, this will be a region to watch since we have historically bounced twice from here before. We are expecting price to break through without too much of a fight however and the next stop will likely be close to $6,100 - $6,000.

There may indeed be a bounce at this level as well and we will be looking closely to see how the price action unfolds.  There may be some short-term counter-trend trades which present themselves but we will also be looking for shorting entries as the prevailing bear trend ensues.

Buckle up ladies and gents

 ;)

The bulls have managed to regain some control after refusing to let BTC fall below the key support level of $5,800.

Yesterday, price did again test yearly lows, wicking $5,860 before being propelled higher to the top of the range at $6,550 which we currently find ourselves in.  On the 4H we have made a double top and price has again wicked the higher extremity of $6,636 - if you dial down to the 1h, you can see that a small sell off happening.

This is to be expected after a 13% surge in price from the lower end of the range.  We’re still printing lower highs and lower lows and the trend is still bearish but as we come back down, it will be important to see how BTC interacts with the $6,200 range.

If we enter into sideways consolidation here as we have done so previously at this level, we will be looking closely for signs of strength to indicate a leg higher, pressing up to $7,000.

If we break through this level we’ll be looking to short back down to $6,000 and possibly below depending on how the price unfolds – these are our musings but it is still too early to tell. Caveat

Looks like I agree with your statement here, as this sideways trading is prepping up and might create a new trend towards $7000. Otherwise we are going back to the $5800-$6000 range and then the cycle repeats itself. So we really need to what how everything unfolds in the next couple of days. And that's what we love all this TA and speculations in the market, we have pedictions but we really don't know whats going to happen and everything can flip in a matter of minutes. ;D

Sadly but this is the destiny of cryptocurrency. Although it is so bad to hear some news regarding this kind of news, well, let us all embrace what we are having. That's crypto, that's life.

https://i.imgur.com/RtXe7V1.png
Posted this in April and still holds true. Since then it has bounced back from the support at $5400-$6000 multiple times. A pattern from 2014 is being repeated which may last for 413 bars (each bar is 1 day).
Which means bitcoin may remain bearish for the rest of the year.

If the support breaksdown, the next level will be around $3000.

Although once the downturn is over it may go beyond $120000