Bitcoin Forum

I bought my first bitcoin and litecoin in 2014. Then the market crashed and stayed low for years. I lost interest, and I  felt like I had some worthless internet money hat I wasted real USD on.

I moved on with my life, and kind of assumed that the media hype, and market manipulation (williebot) pushes the price to an unrealistic $1200...and with the fall of mount gox the good times were over.


Than 2017 came along and things picked up...the media hype swelled. Average people like my friends were buying crypto. It climbed to 20K...Than the crash...and pretty much everyone got burned.

What I’m trying to decide in my head...is whether the 2018 crash is like the 2014 crash, or if it is something different entirely.  I discussed with my “non crypto” father in law the other day, and I said “I’ve been down this road before. But I STILL think Bitcoin is going to reach 20K again and beyond eventually.” He disagreed. His feeling was that it was too saturated this time, that was the difference. Too many people got involved. There was too much institutional interest, unlike the 2014 crash where the pinnacle was really just chasing Dorian around by the media asking if he was Satoshi.

My point? Is it possible my father in law is right? Perhaps the 2017 boom and bust was fueled by such a higher level of public awareness than the 2014 crash, that this could have been the absolute peak. (I don’t believe it...but maybe I’m delusional!)

The 2013 crash was more brutal. Remember that there was only MtGox back then having most of the liquidity in Bitcoin. If there was a time to think Bitcoin was going to die, then that was the MtGox apocalypse.

The fact that Bitcoin survived that made me realize how delusional people that think Bitcoin will ever die are. Now we have tons of different sources of liquidity with different exchanges. The fatal 2013 scenario cannot ever be repeated again. The current crash is just a healthy correction after the market went apeshit. At a slower pace, and with much better fundamentals. The bottoms keep being higher than the previous bubble's peaks which is all that matters .This is called progress. Long term we've never stopped going up. Of course short sighted noobs may argue otherwise.

 the major difference is the level of fear so far is lower and the levels of bearish posts much much lower. We either have further to go or the asset class has matured a bit (or both)

Mt Gox was well on its way to being replaced by the time it died. BitStamp was well established as was coinbase. Bitfinex had started up along with others. we weren't as reliant on Gox as you suggest in 2014.

This is true. I signed up for mt gox but my first actual bitcoin purchase was coinbase.

the funny (or maybe sad) part is that the 2014 crash and 2018 crash had nothing in common. the 2014 one was because of a fake pump and a fake bubble followed by a bubble burst AND the biggest exchange scam of history, while the 2017 rise was a lot more natural although it ended up with a bubble.

but i think people compared them enough times in their heads that they ended up believing in it and then shaped the market based on that belief. specially when price was pushed below $10k the panic buttons were pushed right after...

True, Bitstamp was up and coming already and actually surpassed MtGox in terms of volume at some point (that was when problems started stacking up and rumors of bankruptcy and shady behaviour were already being brought up), however, the amount of bitcoins stored in MtGox was as far as im concerned way higher than the rest of exchanges combined.

So it was like an huge ticking time bomb and by bomb I mean a proper 850,000 BTC nuke. If you look at the biggest bitcoin addresses nowadays, I don't think there isn't any exchange that has that many coins even if you combined a couple of the biggest addresses. Now the risk is way more diversified and we can no longer go back to the MtGox bad fundamentals so everything after MtGox feels like a joke and mindless FUD.

If I remember correctly, MtGox was about 80% of the exchange market when the 2014 crash happened.

There are slightly more coins available in 2017 then 2014 but still the greatest reason for price to rise is population growth in Crypto usage.  We are far off the absolute limits

So there is a giant imbalance between supply and demand that favours a higher price long term.  This whole argument relys on one thing and is BTC or any other crypto more usefull then the FIAT alternatives.  Also FIAT or political money is tied to government debt which causes it to become worth less every year.   These factors determine the peak and overall usage and demand I think

I remember halving, which is always done by bitcoin.
2012 halving
2013 rising high
2014 fall again
2015 tried to recover
2016 halving
2017 rising high
2018 fall again
2019 .....???
2020 halving (https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com)
2021 you know  :) :D

Yeah but back then any crash on the darkmarket meant a huge crash for bitcoin. We have moved on from the dark services but I think a large portion still depends on it. More good ICOs coming and we will see more and more positivity.

It sounds like your father is ignoring the properties of Bitcoin that make it valuable and instead think about it as some sort of fad like a beanie baby. Meanwhile Bitcoin keeps getting improved, last year we had SegWit, now Schnorr and LN are being worked on, in the future we'll probably have sidechains and smart contracts. Bitcoin's ecosystem is growing with more and more businesses adopting it, Lightning has potential to create new types of services. Bitcoin becomes more accepted as money as less and less people call it a useless bubble and ponzi. All these things can justify the price way above $20,000. You can't analyze Bitcoin as a stock, but you can and should analyze it as software.

I won't be technical with my explanation but the drop in 2014 is way different then what we have now. With the recent price correction we have from our ATH Bitcoin definitely gained a lot of attention not only from the media but also from normal people entering the market, and just like you said even your friends have bought Bitcoin during the recent rally. Now the drop contained a lot of whales cashing out and of course the new players cutting losses and with several lower highs later and a lot of people selling again and again we have reached to a destination on where we are now.

But the difference with this drop is aside from the media and the average people, the governments of countries also have gained attention on cryptocurrencies on the possibility of making it work together with their country, we saw it first in Japan and Korea and a lot of countries are following their footsteps. Now if the government is until now trying to work things out with cryptocurrencies what made you think that BTC won't recover this time? The key is if the government will play it right on making cryptocurrencies work with their country (several of them) we might see that this market will start to recover soon.

I'm not serious on bitcoin back then, but there could be a lot of difference regarding the 2013-14, like the Mt. Gox (and its subsequent fall), which control most of the trading exchanges during that time. Now, we have more exchanges and so there is at least distribution of trading along the way. I also been guided by this old adage:


Specially in this market wherein there's a lot of manipulation from behind and market speculators taking advantage of every situation. We might see similarities, but there's a lot of factors that we can distinguished between 2013-2014 and the current situation that we are facing.

Feels about the same to me, at least in terms of sentiment during this long bearish post-pop period.

That weird feeling of "well, surely that was the bottom & we're in recovery now? oh, lol, guess not" is back in full force :)

As far as market saturation, well. Institutional gamblers speculators didn't really have a convenient instrument to play around with it.

And actual non-speculative use of the thing during 2017 was hampered by huge transaction fees; you couldn't reasonably transact in it unless you were moving hundreds or thousands of bucks.
See, f'rex, Steam pulling its support for BTC payments.

If both those conditions change, well, there's your new market that wasn't tapped in '17.

i have basically started the same time as you and the price fell nearly 60-65% after i started and of course i was a newbie and were confused but also i knew that bitcoin has a lot more potential than that! i tried to understand what bitcoin really means outside of price and that helped open my eyes more so that i don't think things like "worthless internet money" :D

there was a higher public awareness than 2014, every day there is higher awareness and more adoption but it was nowhere near the peak because there still is a very small percentage of the world that have reached that awareness and a smaller percentage of them who actually did something with that awareness.

in 2014 things were already over and we knew what was going on that is why other exchanges were growing. the important time was during the rise and the the peak and the crash. and during those times Gox was the biggest. you can check the volumes on one of those historical charts that has all exchanges. Mt Gox had 80-85% of the volume at the time.
like this https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zv.

No ..i think that is different

OP, you will not get a post that says that the "2017 - 2018 crash" is more brutal unless Bitcoin crashes down to $1000 - $2000, and with non-stop "Bitcoin is dead" FUD posts coming from fudsters like kwukduck. Hahaha.

The reason for the 2017 crash was different,compared with the 2018 price decline ,but I think they are pretty similar.Now,we have more traders,more HODLers,more crypto whales and more cryptocurrency exchange platforms compared with 2013-2014.This means that bitcoin price has more support that will push it back,when a crash occurs.

I think OP got confused as the market crashed in 2018 and it was not so badly crashed like in 2013/14 but it is getting correction and the panic traders are selling in loss but long term holder are still bullish in the market but it will take time to pull back the market

obviously if you just look at "price going down" and nothing else  then they look and feel similar. specially to someone who called bitcoin "worthless internet money" at some point!

but if you look at the market situation, the reason, the sentiment of traders and the adoption that is going on you can see that the two of them are very different.

something funny that your topic reminded me of is the same exact topics of yours back in early 2017 (a year ago) where charts of that time were posted on top of charts of 2013-2014 and they claimed they look exactly the same. and that $1200 is the top and we should see a 3 year bear market :D

^  Lmao!  Yup.  And I have witnessed both crashes and I can def say they 'feel' exactly the same!  Losing def hurts...  A lot!  It's like feeling one big adrenaline dump and you realize that you've lost a lot of value.

I think that it's going to be similar to the 2014 crash.

It's not going to follow the exact same paths, but the patterns within both of these bear markets should be relatively the same, including the percentage decrease from the peak before prices bottom out finally (around 70-85% in both bear markets).


I disagree with this sentiment. Even though it seems like that we've already achieved mass adoption and demand is at its historical peak, I think that if you put this into a long term perspective, we're still in an early adopters phase. Institutional investors did not participate much within the last bull market, but are flooding in as the bear market ensues. This bear market could last for a few years, but i do expect a full recovery in price sooner or later, and also adoption picking up sooner or later as well.

%87 drop to be precise:

https://steemitimages.com/DQmVfCys4jkhBTEu7CDMXJB8YYd5WQptcC4XV8tagLVf8im/image.png

So imagine a %87 drop within a totally clusterfucked fundamental analysis situation. I mean, the worst fundamentals you could come up with:

-Most coins concentrated into the hands of an amateur running an exchange
-Press left and right shitting on bitcoin
-People in power saying it's a scam daily and will die
-Fork wars already brewing in the horizon with gavin and co entering in conflict with the core roadmap
-Any hopes of scaling felt like vaporware (no LN etc)
-Halving years away so not even that bullish force happening anytime soon

It was really worst period on bitcoin by a long shot. Now everything feels way more solid. People panicking clearly don't understand how bad 2013 was, they lack proper perspective.

I'd say that yes, the crash this year seems to be relatively resemblant of the 2014 scenario.

If your father is suggesting that bitcoin would not be able to make a recovery from the bear market and establish a new all time high in the coming years, then I think that he is wrong. BTC is in its infancy still, and we're nowhere near the level of adoption and institutional investment in my opinion that we'll going to see in the next decade as bitcoin's user base continues to grow.

I think that prices will most likely start emerging out of the bear market by 2020, when the historically bullish halving event will be able to increase the level of bullish sentiment within the market. We're actually not seeing a decline in institutional interest, but rather the opposite. Despite the bear market, there is a general increase in institutional investment and development plans relating to bitcoin. That's why I believe buying now, at a level below $7k, is a good investment decision.