Bitcoin Forum

With the exception of Ethereum, which seems to have started the year with all guns blazing ahead of the Constantinople fork, it won’t surprise anyone that the market analysts SFOX rate crypto as “moderately bearish” entering 2019. In fact, with further sharp drops in all major coins today, perhaps even the word “moderately” is wishful thinking.

However, unlike many price predictions based on the instincts of even the most credible CEO or economist, the SFOX Volatility Report is based on more than just sentiment.

The cryptocurrency dealer and market analyst takes into account trading volume, price, and volatility data from eight major exchanges. They then come up with an index by analyzing three major factors: market sentiment, volatility, and how the sector, in general, is advancing.

Throughout 2018, this index ranged from highly bullish to positively bearish with November and December the most volatile months on record.

CCN | https://www.ccn.com/why-the-crypto-market-remains-moderately-bearish-in-2019/

That's really frustrating to see the CMC chart. The prices of top coins are dropping very cheaply, I was hoping for a massive pump as the first priority but crypto has some other thoughts. I think some big whales will be behind this downfall.

ETH is a pump and dump coin and it only got pumped because of its fork hype and the time was right too since it was dumped hard prior to the small pump (down to $80ish). not to mention that it wasn't "guns blazing" pump either since it was a small pump which couldn't even bring it to $200! and it was killed in its infancy.

bearish would have been if price of bitcoin went below $3k not when it is pretty much the same as it was before! fluctuating within the same channels.

Then you need to be mentally tough here because we will see the price fluctuating wildly in the first quarter. There's no indication of bull run and we might experience another drop to $3000 something if panic sellers will push the sell button. Possible that whales tried to manipulate the price again, or speculators getting bored of the sideways trend we have been seeing and just decided to dump to take some profits, rinse and repeat.

Just because the price didn't break that support level yet doesn't mean the market is overall bearish. It may not be bearish for the last month or so we've been stuck in this range but for the last year the price has been trending downwards. Until there are 2-3+ months of growth the market will and should still be considered as bearish.

I agree. A little push upwards doesn't take us out of the woods by a long shot. The bears for me still hold the advantage over the bulls who seem to be enjoying themselves hibernating and watching people being beaten black and blue.

Still in bear market conditions because recovery cannot be done in a short time with poor market conditions, remain calm and be patient.

I'd cling more on the market's sentiment which will cause the poor performance of the cryptomarket in 2019. Most people won't buy into a mess when there are no definite signals available anywhere; they need some sort of assurance that their money isn't going to a waste. As for the developments happening within the ecosystem, I'm pretty sure that most people are just waiting for Bakkt to launch and that's pretty much their signal in buying (that is if it gets approved, he he), but for now, everything is mere speculation and assumption by us.

All of these bearish forecasts are basing their theory on one thing ; volume. We have really low volume and always have a chaotic drop whenever a big sell happens. Now it is quite easy to sell 500 million dollar worth of bitcoin considering there are early investors and really rich folks who got into bitcoin a bit later.

However, its a lot harder to buy 500 million dollar worth of bitcoins considering it is first of a legal hassle for tax reasons plus you would make the market go higher because of your buy order and wouldn't be capable of buying bitcoin at the market value because of your own big purchase.

If the volume keeps staying low all we have to have is one big sell like Craig did 2 months ago and we will see another big drop in the price which is why bitcoin and crypto in general is "moderately bearish" until we get to a level where either price is high again so we don't have to worry about the drop or we have big enough volume to eat up any big sales.

Moderately bearish in that I expect the price to stay between $3000 and $4500 (also possible to see a brief drop below 3000) for the next half year or so yes. It's moderately bearish because there is no reason to expect the bull run to start in the near future (though certainly I think later in the year).

November and December has been the most volatile time of the year and 2018 was not exempted.  I think the word moderate bearish is not familiar with some of us traders and I am coming across it for first time. However,  the bearish trend that started since January 2018 till this moment has cage the bull traders and it is truth that many of them has started to change strategies by hedging bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies with usdt.  Traders are taking little profits from the little movements that happened to bitcoin and others coins and that has makes the pricing to remain in bearish position.

TA confirms the theory as well, i pointed this out on one of my analysis, anyone who has been through a few bear market knows that it's always followed by some sort of flat likely bearish swing that can last for months/years.

some people think that going up will be as at the same speed of going down, this is wrong, look at the charts, history always repeats itself

Bear > sideways > Bull

if we would assume that 3.2k was our bottom, then we can range between the bottom and 5-6k for at least Q1,Q2,Q3 of 2019,  the only good thing about crypto that even in it's flat season the gains and the losses are a lot , due to this small market cap, everything from now or wherever the bottom is, will be slow until the break of ATH again when then we will see some fast upward movements, but going by the book, everything now points to a boring year, nothing major till 2020.

Precisely, it's happened every time so far with bitcoin and with nearly everything form of investment ever. Confidence in a market takes time to recover. The only people who are truly in belief that the price will make a miraculously recover in the matter of weeks or a couple of months are clearly clueless as to the way things work and always will be.

not at all.
we don't need the bull market to start (in other words we don't need to see 2-3 months of big rises) for the bear market to end. the thing is, even the drop below $6k doesn't make the current trend "bearish" at least in my opinion because if you look at WHY it dropped this low you can see that it wasn't because of some trend or anything like that. that trend (the bearish one) had ended long time ago. the drop was purely because of a large scale attack on bitcoin from the BCash people which whales got behind to make more money from shorting bitcoin.
that in my view is not a "trend", it is more like an incident :D

Calling it an incident makes perfect sense. The stable price for bitcoin should still be $6500 and it would still be if not for the BCH hash war. When bitmain gets control of itself and people stop wasting time on ABC / SV then bitcoin and the rest of the market will get back to normal

We all see this bearish news all the time recently, ever since 2019 started we all have been seeing these news that talk about how bitcoin still looks bearish, how bitcoin will reach new lows before going up, how volume is not enough.

I am starting to think maybe there are people in the world with enough money to create some sort of FUD in order to make people sell their coins and drop the price so they can buy cheap before the SEC and Bakkt happens, after all we are all waiting for that news and if both of them happen together than the price should be going really high and what better way to spend your money than making sure bitcoin drops before those things happen and buying bitcoin.

You don't even have to make a huge amount of "donation" to these news websites, if you give them the news they will publish it.

I wouldn't rely too much on the coming Constantinople fork of Ethereum. The forks we have seen recently (like the one which led to the so-called hash wars) seem not to have a refreshing effect on stagnating prices lately (as we have been trending sideways since November crash), if only downwards. Apart from that, Ethereum itself and its forks are not trustworthy in my opinion. Last time they did something to that tune, it ended with a disaster and led to creation of yet another fork that became known as Ethereum Classic (which, as I suspect, is not much better either)

Or it may be not the last time really, but you get the point

the hype of that fork seems to already be over and in fact i believe the recent small drop in bitcoin price might have been because of the ETH fork hype dying off and the whales dumping the  coins they bought for short term profit.
people doesn't seem to be so happy about the big change they are forcing on them regarding this switch from PoW to an inferior algorithm.

Wow, they are going to switch over to POS, right?

That would be exceptionally interesting to see how things will proceed with this fork. Though I would no doubt sell my ethers if I had any. Yeah, I know you already expect this question, but why do you think that POS is an inferior algo compared to POW, really?

From my perspective, POW is a huge waste of electricity, making Bitcoin (or any other coin using it) completely unfit as a world money if it ever comes to that. And it is not only that, of course

It's not manipulation, just a logical movement. It failed to break out, so what usually happens is that the price goes down. If you don't sell, then someone else will, and that usually triggers a bit of a panic reaction.

We're very close to the point where in 2015 the price found its all time bottom around $152 so it will be interesting to see if we see something similar happen this time. Considering how similar the selloffs were, it wouldn't even surprise me, especially with how tax sales could also be a factor to take into consideration with how we have more professional entities in the space than ever before.

Let's hope you will be right, this time like never before

With that said, though, let's not forget that in 2015 there actually were two lows. The first, which you already mentioned, was set somewhere in January or February (don't remember which month for certain), while the second in late August of that year when the price went below $200 for a few minutes at Bitfinex (I had been there and seen the exact moment with my own eyes). And if there is in fact some similarity between then and now, we may have to wait a little longer than most of us expect or hope

6k to 3k may not have been because of a trend. 20k down to 6k was and remaining at around 3k following the dip is also a sign of that. If it was just because of an incident (as you put it) then we'd have seen a swift reversal back towards 6k. We didn't see that because people were still bearish enough not to want to buy up the supply even at lower levels.

I think we've experienced that sort of stuff in the past. News outlets don't exactly release FUD articles just because they want to create panic among bitcoin holders, there's gotta be some sort of shady stuff going on behind the scenes that makes these websites (like cnbc or cnn) want to spread bullshit articles. But I doubt the last drop was due to some whales trying to tank the prices so that other whales can buy cheap, or because of some FUD, I think it was mainly a pullback after not being ble to break the 4k, again.

If it was not for the whales it is likely the price will be even lower, after all who do you think is buying all the coins of the investors that panicked and were selling their coins? The whales of course, so if anything we should be happy the whales believe in this market and buy so many coins, but whales despite their power cannot make the price of most coins to go up so until more investors decide to come back to the market we are stuck with a market which will not move much.

It's good to see someone defend whales rather than accusing them of manipulating the price downwards to buy in cheaper. There is no shortage of whales are manipulators fools in here....

Most of the people don't provide buy support to an exchange, whales do. The average buyer places an order at market price and have it filled near instantly in most cases.

Whales provide buy support to protect what they hold in Bitcoin, which means that they protect your value as well. It's hard to think of entities who aren't down from +$6000 to where we are right now in terms of USD portfolio value.

Actually, it perfectly well works in reverse too

Or who do you think is driving prices down these days, sharks or small fish? Without whales we would be trading in a very narrow range at whatever price, though at higher prices, as I explained in this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2552649.msg26018333#msg26018333) topic, the market becomes a lot more volatile and basically anyone with a couple of bitcoins in their pockets can easily move the price in either direction (or start an avalanche of sell-offs). So any way you look at it, it is the whales who are responsible for any big price action, and as we are going downhill most of the time now, it is them at work as well

I think there are few reasons why the expert think we are going to have bearish market in 2019, I think the investors still frustrated with the big correction in 2018 so they don't really dare to make huge purchase yet, and many people think that the market still full of manipulators,so the chance to make profits is hard, and with no big companies said want to adopt crypto then the gloomy situation might be continue, but it's just a prediction, everything still can change

This is another example of how distorted the thinking of the majority of Bitcoin users is

They are not in Bitcoin to use it as intended, i.e. a currency, a means of payment, and so forth. They want big companies to adopt crypto so that they can have a chance to make profits. I suspect it won't work that way. In fact, it worked for once in the past (though without big companies), but there might not be a fresh restart or second chance as many are hoping for. It doesn't mean that Bitcoin is going to die or disappear, it means that its speculative value and thus its usefulness for speculation are going to shrink considerably

it is too soon to predict how the market is going to be in 2019 let alone make the conclusion already and call it bullish or bearish. we have just entered this year and we did it after one of the biggest dramas in bitcoin community with another one of BCASH's attacks against bitcoin that also succeeded in crashing its price.

for the market to move ahead, it first has to heal from the damage that was done to it and the investor confidence to come back as the healing process continues. then we can see the real trend shape up. which doesn't have that much chance to continue being bearish since it was bearish for over a year now.

But the question is how to heal the market itself if investors didn't invest? They are now afraid to invest due to this continuously down price in the market. Or we must blame those whales investors because they are continuing in manipulating the crypto market cap. However, let's wait for the result of ETF and BAKKT implementation, that probably it will help to heal the price in the market.

People still can't see the fact that it has been just 3 weeks. We should be looking at the upcoming news instead of looking back on the history of bitcoin. No matter what happens people always look at how market has moved instead of the potential moves. There were a lot of people who believed bitcoin would go up on December because it did last year, we have seen how wrong there were, now maybe same people or maybe different people are expecting a drop in bitcoin because its January and it dropped last year.

It never does the same thing again and again every year, if it did we would all be rich by buying during summer and selling during December. We should look at the future and what it holds for bitcoin, instead of news coming up out of nowhere all the news we have in our hand says that bitcoin will be going up this year. Maybe not a whole lot but even a bit.

bitcoin is still hanging around the bottom and wants to be sure we have seen the bottom. Except for those who bought during the last bull, +$3000 is a good bottom for the last ATH. Your moderate bearish is the side ways moment we expect, to old time bitcoin users they are so relax and they are taking their time. Those that are worried are those that dont have enough fiat to deal with thing till the market gets back.

The article title is bait, but what else can you expect from news outlets? And what news are you referring to? There is no news that will lift the market back up. The history of Bitcoin in terms of price action has proven to be a more than reliable indicator of what will happen in the future, so it makes sense to pay attention to that.

It seems that the charts disagree with your assessment. Admittedly, it's easy talking afterwards, but we can clearly see how similar the cycles still are.

Charlie Lee saw it coming and dumped his Litecoins and even warned people, but not many paid attention.

I'm a big trend trader, so I'm with you. Although we've got to keep in mind that old adage, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns." That's why it's always good to take some profits off the table during each bubble. This gravy train won't last forever.

That's something I've remembered and very, very few in my circles have, despite claiming to follow a lot of these big hodlers. In fact, if I recall more precisely, he was saying something like he's been in crypto for years, and if we can enjoy an ATH for Lite, then we can certainly prepare for $20 or something, which was way below 10% of ATH.

Wise words, however you see the guy, so we should be prepared for sub-2000 easily.

Good thing is, he's a believer in the long-term too, so if we think his low valuation will be reached, we can also think a return to ATH is a matter of when.

We should certainly be prepared for that since it's very possible, but we should keep in mind Litecoin (and all altcoins) will always fall much further than Bitcoin. After the 2013 peak, Litecoin fell ~98% vs. Bitcoin's 87%. That 11% might not look like much, but deep into a bear market, it's huge. If Bitcoin fell that far in 2014 we would have bottomed near $25 instead of $150!

So while I'm prepared for the worst, I'm expecting higher. I'll be very surprised if we go sub-$2000.

now the price of bitcoin has reached $ 3,500, so in your opinion it's not bearish? if there is a sufficient price reduction in the likelihood of the price of bitcoin falling below $ 3k.

That is because bitcoin is the entry and exit points, that causes the bitcoin to move less fractionally then other coins. Think about it this way, when someone wants to get out to cash fiat currency, most of the world still have local places that allows you to sell your bitcoin to local currency and send it to your bank account right ?

Well, that means if you have bitcoin you sell bitcoin, and that's it, however if you have litecoin then you sell your litecoin and buy bitcoin with it, sell your bitcoin and get fiat. Which means litecoin is losing value by getting sold whereas bitcoin stays the same because it is both bought and sold. That is why whenever people get out of crypto in general bitcoin still drops but drops a lot less then the altcoins that are getting dumped.

That's a poor man's logic

You could just as well say that if someone sells their litecoins for fiat, Litecoin loses value and that would do just fine as an explanation. In other words, you will have to leave no stone unturned if you actually wanted to find an exchange that would trade Bitcoin for fiat and would not trade Litecoin for the same fiat at the same time. Obviously, it is not the case with most shitcoins, but who cares about them and their holders anyway?

I don't agree that it is just moderately bearish. And we never remain that way because 2018 was a devastation when we expected that btc will stay forever in the $6k price. In my opinion, we are on a severe stage of bear period.

The market needs time to recover and still needs time to foster confidence in crypto currencies to increase adoption rates. It is still difficult to predict when the bear will disappear, and you better keep calm with the current market conditions.

he just used a bad example (litecoin) to explain what has been also explained before. it is not about the most popular and the oldest altcoin which happens to be listed on major exchanges that trade it with fiat. it is about other 2500 altcoins, specially the big altcoins that are being traded with large volumes (get dumped on large scale too) but don't have fiat market or if they do, they don't have it on major exchanges. for example someone who uses Coinbase as his bitcoin trading platform and Binance for his altcoins, has to sell for bitcoin, then transfer that bitcoin to coinbase and sell for fiat. and that is why bitcoin drops when there is a gigantic altcoin dump going on.

the reason why it is not dropping as much is be cause bitcoin market is huge and it can absorb that kind of crap and also because not everyone exits to fiat, they dump their shitcoins to get their valuable bitcoin back not their fiat back.

Crypto is bearish because markets don't jump straight to bull rally when they reach the bottom, usually there's a long period of stagnation, and stagnation means uncertainty. You can't say the the bottom has been passed until you can say for sure that the bull market has begun. If we extrapolate the past patterns, we can predict that most if not all of the 2019 will be marked with stagnating bearishness, and maybe only at the end of it we'll have signs of recovery. After all, there's a halvening in 2020, and this is how it played out in 2016.

Shitcoins, despite their multitude, are inconsequential

Even if their numbers are in the thousands, their effect on Bitcoin's price is likely in the thousandth of a percent. In any case, this effect wouldn't be greater than the margin of error provided Bitcoin is actually used as a conversion device (which itself adds another level of doubt). People with shitcoins use exchanges where you can exchange them directly for fiat without the hassle of multiple conversions (for example, Cryptopia)

If anything, it is Bitcoin's price moving a couple of percentage points with shitcoins crashing like there's no tomorrow

I don't quite like such statement, far too broad IMHO.
You don't like a coin, call it shitcoin all you want. But the fact is that inside all those new coins, most of them have low technological value or usecases but SOME OF THEM have something unique. Be it usecases like ETH and ICO or technological differences like Monero or GRIN. It's easy to call everything not bitcoin shitcoin but it's unfair and innacurate. There is value everywhere including in the altcoins.

I understand your pain

And to alleviate it somehow, let me tell you that I in no case consider all altcoins shitcoins. In fact, far from that. If that was your first thought, you can now safely abandon it. I don't know what ICO is unless you refer to Initial Coin Offering, of course (though in that case it is not clear why do you mention it after Ethereum), but to make things clear, I don't consider Ethereum a shitcoin, either. While it is certainly easy to call everything not bitcoin a shitcoin, I'm far from that as well. Quite the contrary, some altcoins are quite useful and can even be Bitcoin's proxies as a means of payment for daily necessities (for example, Litecoin)

Bearish market that we witnessed in 2018 has been transferred to this month and that do not mean the bearish market is going to continue.  If you are a trader you will need to understand that most year at this time cryptocurrencies market behave at a stagnated price it is from February that we do see bull run.

Time will heal the wounds and this market will be great again. I don’t see specific reason for the early dump this year but I think we are still not recovering from the previous bearish trend. Bear will really disappear in time and it can happen if we start to think positively and encourage people to invest.

Maybe there's no dump yet because the bears is already exhausted at this point. But it doesn't mean we are in the road to recovery, the market conditions will be pretty much stagnant and will go flat line so it means that the market will continue to bleed.


If will definitely continue in 2019 because there are no catalyst so the bearish market will continue, sad to say. So experience traders either continue to buy more during dips or just going to short and squeeze every ounce of profit so its going to be hard to see recovery, unless a positive news will propel the price, but so far we haven't seen or heard anything.

Before the last year's strong bullish trend the market was the same as now, by that time people were not this speculative about the bullish market. All of the sudden the growth took place in unexpected time period. Once after that people began to have a mental thought of bitcoin growing higher. To that things took place in the opposite way, which people cannot accept even though the ongoing bearish trend is a common thing.

I've got your point there, let's do patiently wait bitcoin recover itself although itis now remains bearish nothing permanent price in cryptomarket movement everything will have a volatile reaction and we are still hoping that the time of bullish market will come. 2019 is still no good news but yet we are still on Q1 of the year hopefully in the middle of this year there's progress.

We all know the answer.The crypto whales don't want to buy,because there's no room for hype.All the newbies and small traders,all the "stupid money" need hype and FOMO,in order to start buying btc and pump the price to another bubble.

I completely disagree with most answers here.

Crypto is not bearish in 2019. Crypto is bearish in January and February thats all.
Beginning of the year is Always a bit hard for crypto because people dont have the time, money and will to invest. Even as a crypto holder myself I'm not investing at the moment because between the end of the year spendings and the New year taxes I dont have much to invest...

Just give the market a month or two!

Agree, stagnant prices don't bode well for Bitcoin's growth

It is only a matter of time till someone big decides to cash out and then an avalanche of sell-offs will start like it happened two months ago. And this cycle can repeat itself many times before we start to feel a real bottom under our feet. Same thing happened in 2014-2015 as we spiraled down with a few stops here and there. In 2013 we reached +$1100, then for some time we traded at $600, after a while crashed to $400, and finally ended up with prices below $200 before the real growth began

We need to stay focus as the market is still not doing good. Those who can wait will get their own reward if they will continue to stay positive even with this bearish situation. We know that this bear will get tired with the coming of good news and more adoption and that's we need to be patient for that to happen. Yeah whales had taken control of the market as many newbies had been panic to sell their coins when the price is in downfall. Hold-on and be optimistic.

One of the reason why bearish still strong because of those weak holders who can't manage to hold well, each time little rise happen they will sell right away thinking of cutting their losses from the previous peak, if this will be removed and what will left around are all strong holders, value will start to
rise while we are waiting for more adoptions and updates, big investors will soon to recognize the potential if they've seen competition between businessman are all strong.

You need to cut some slack the year is just 27 days old, and you're making an assumption of the whole year already. It 2019 so far there hasn't been anything to consider bearish about the market in my opinion, we are only simply because of how 2018's market was.

I hope that the market situation for this year will not be like last year with some improvement in the prices of cryptocurrencies. Some are optimistic about possible surge of some coins like ethereum with its upcoming hardfork. Many altcoins have been in price uptrends like waves, trx and hot so I believe that the market this year will be different than last year.

tax season is approaching, true, but 2018 was a year of huge losses across the crypto markets. most investors probably had capital losses, not capital gains. so i don't think upcoming tax payments are playing a big role. holiday spending may be a factor......post-holiday consumer spending usually declines so that might apply to investment too.

overall though, i think we're just reeling from the november crash. nothing too surprising here.

see the current ETH price:

https://i.imgur.com/TtDEbb1.png

January 4, the ETH price was  $156 and in relation to bitcoin it was 0.04 BTC

Imagine who bought ETH on January 4?

this is the great problem of this crypto world.

If someone says: " BAKKT was launched today " the price suddenly rises, even if BAKKT are not yet buying bitcoin. the price increases only because of news and not because there was a lot of demand that justified the increase of price.


many of these altcoins only solve the problems of the internet and there are many Copy/Past projects, so you can not expect them to increase much without a pump and dump scheme

There is not much response from the investors to the upcoming ethereum hard fork because the prices of ethereum keep declining so you also need to keep ignore those manipulation hard fork and just keep focusing and the bitcoin investment heavily then considering about the altcoins.

Well those that didn't focus on btc and dealt with alts like trx instead have been reaping good rewards in this bear market. Times like these you have to be a little more flexible in assessing your next move. I've almost tripled my trx investments in 2 months in a bear market. And if btc decides to make a run then all the better.