Bitcoin Forum

So the start of the 2014 bear market was due to the MtGox collapse and China banning bitcoin. Then the 2018 bear market was due to the MtGox trustee liquidating some coins and the Ponzi scheme Bitconnect blowing up. Then the peak of 2019 in the Summer entered another small bear market due to the collapse of PlusToken.

We had a few very short dips caused by "Bitfinex hacked" and "Silk Road shutting down" but they didn't really start the bear market.

So here we are in 2020, looks like BTC will break ATH and who knows when it will top out, maybe in Dec 2020 or maybe in Dec 2021. However there is always some reason for starting a bitcoin bear market.

So what is your opinion of an event that might trigger another crypto multi year long bear market?

China Banning bitcoin doesn't have an effect anymore.
Neither does Tether FUD which was occuring over and over again
Maybe MtGox coins released to customers after 6 years?
Some new Ponzi scheme goes bust?
Coinbase gets hacked?
Satoshi decides to "take profit"?
Quantum Computers pose security risk?

China has never banned bitcoin. the FUD said they banned it probably about 50 times but they never did.
and the 2014 drop was simply a bubble burst just like the previous bubble bursts in 2012, 2010, etc. MtGox collapse was only the cherry on top.

actually the MtGox trustee was selling bitcoin while the price was rising months before the ATH (starting from around $4k all the way to $8k when they were done, the price continue rising from $8k to $20k then bubble popped).
again the 2018 was also another bubble burst.

this wasn't significant enough to cause a drop. the timing that i remember was also different from the price drop we had.

the next bubble will be the reason for the next (5th) bubble burst and bear market which will probably take place in 2022.

The possibility of satoshi taking profit is little but still, we can't remove that unexpected act would come from the sleeping bitcoins he has.

ICO falling down contributed to 2018's bear market and as we have today, there are the defis. What if the collapse of most of the defi projects will be the next scenario which will push the market into another long bearish market?

But that bear would create a higher low this time.

I'd say that all of the scenarios you mentioned are very unlikely to have major influences over BTC pricing.

The truth is that BTC has evolved to a point where it is entirely independent from the traditional fiat economy. Regulatory changes and pressures will no doubt affect bitcoin pricing one way or another, but I think that it is truly overblown by the media the extent of this impact.

The market is also mature enough at this point to distinguish between ponzi schemes run by fraudsters and bitcoin itself, which is merely exploited by these people.

I'd honestly attribute the next bear market to just a normal market cycle. It happens every once every four years and even if there isn't real substance to it, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy given that enough people believe it - which a lot of people do, given the historical performance.

The same catalyst that started the big bitcoin rally, companies who dibs on bitcoin, and then getting out and taking profits when we reach another all time high in the future. And just like the bubble in 2017, it will be gradual but the effect of this institutional money bailing out will be long and hard bearish market.

You can't just put some reasons behind these bear markets and call them the logic behind all of them. The real reason was people selling their bitcoin and there is nothing else. I could always come up with another reason if I want to, like 2014 was due to high transaction fees for example or 2018 was due to BCH fork fight that resulted with Craig Wright selling thousands of coins. None of them are real reasons I am just showing how it is possible to show another example if I want to.

The real reason is always the same, people wanted to sell their coins and they sold it which caused the price of bitcoin to go down, nothing more to it and nothing less about it. As long as people keep buying, all the bad things could happen and we would still go up. Hell we are nearly breaking ATH and we are in a pandemic right now.

None of the above, mate. I guess the next bear market will happen when even at least one of the rich investors will suddenly decide to liquidate all of his Bitcoin assets. We know how much in hundreds of millions are owned by just an investor or two. If one of them will decide to sell his Bitcoin on crypto exchanges, that would mean the supply would suddenly rise high that demand cannot keep up. That's the time the price will go down. But of course that is very temporary.

That's true, the same catalyst that brought us so far should be seen as same; which can bring us down to bear again. Few days ago, i had some private conversations with someone very close and what we saw was exactly what you have as opinion. The bears will come into play again when these institutional bodies choose to take back their profits from the current market, this will definitely bring bears IMO too. More reasons why we should be more smarter this time than 2017; when they flip-down the entire cryptocurrency market withing few days and kept us hanged with the bears for so long.

Satoshi being revealed as Room 39 in North Korea?

There doesn't need to be a tangible actual event. All there needs to be is a chain reaction of people questioning whether they've spunked too much money in the depths of their frenzy and what is this shit actually worth anyway?

This is 100% as inevitable as its sharp rise in the first place.

There won't be a catalyst, I really am not sure there ever has been one. As banal as it sounds, once a rally happens at this magnitude and momentum, I see it as a rollercoaster ride, with the top unknown, and the plunge there after a natural result of the climb we've just taken.

If you believe in Bitcoin cyclical growth, then you believe there is no need for a catalyst.

I agree with the above, a bull run may need a catalyst to end but it's not a requirement. Sometimes the reason is simple exhaustion of buyers as more and more decide to take profit. I don't agree with OP that bitconnect caused the end of the 2017 bull market. Bitconnect collapsed on January 17 2018 and Bitcoin was already down to 10k from its peak by the end of December 2017. It might cause the price to fall much faster due to negativity and increased fear, but the bull run has ended long before.

The previous bear markets did not start because of the reasons mentioned by the OP. The bear markets started because bitcoin had a parabolic rise and a blow off top which led to mass selling. Bitcoin doesn't go into full on bear markets because of news, it goes into bear markets because of market cycle dynamics. Some of the things mentioned contributed to the past bear markets as the bear market was going along, but they certainly didn't cause it.

Also it's wayyyyy too early to start talking about another bear market. Probably a year or two out from the next one. We haven't even hit the old peak yet, so the main part of the bull market hasn't even begun. The next bear market will happen for the same reason all the others happen: the market cycle ends and the parabolic bull run collapses in on itself from going too high. Should be in a year or two.

Next bear market will occur due to greed and sudden cashout from a couple of huge investors who hold a fair share of Bitcoin, the only difference would be that people might not be investing in Bitcoin once it crosses the ATH in fear of one more dump as the market is mature enough to avoid repeating 2017/2018 once again. I don't think any of the reasons you have listed will affect the bitcoin or the crypto market. But yeah once the investors (whales) cashout this time the panic selling will play a significant role to pull down bitcoin further.

I have a very different view of things. Bad news doesn't cause bear markets. All it can do is catalyze selloffs.

The contrast you raise between the Mt. Gox collapse and the Silk Road collapse is exactly what I'm talking about. In both cases, there was a brutal intraday selloff. However, Gox going down took place during a bear market; the 2013 bubble had already clearly popped long before that. So the bear market accelerated and continued.

The Silk Road selloff took place during a literal bubble (October 2013), so of course the losses were immediately retraced and the bull market continued. No bad news is ever going to stop a bubble.


Exactly. These guys have obviously been around a while.

It must be CBDC that will cause the next long bear market. It could start a bear market when CBDC starts to impose some regulations and taxes. There is much to be afraid of to the CBDC. It's the only thing that's new to crypto. Probably institutional investors being hacked or going to take profit and failure of Defi and DEX.

The main reason is unreasonable growth. If it happens, then a deep correction is inevitable. As for events like MtGox, I'm sure the market will crash if Binance crashes. Too much is now tied to them and as far as I know, they are not doing very well. Many people will say that this is not so, but the fact is that we learn about all the negative after it has happened.

Assuming you mean a multi-year bear market sometime in 2021/2022 or even later, then here's my analysis:

- Tether FUD unlikely as USDT collapse would likely be good for Bitcoin
- MtGox coins hitting the market in a few years, definitely could be a major event
- A ponzi scheme selling after getting busted, possible, but not that likely
- Coinbase hot wallet getting hack, doubtful as they have enough to cover costs
- Satoshi will never take profit imo, I doubt he has access to early keys anymore
- Quantum computer will never pose a serious threat imo

What has CBDC has to do with bear market? Obviously, when government started to roll their CBCD it will have tax some as fiat.

I agree with the sentiments here, the next bear market would begin when we have reach the top again, whether in one to two years time, whales and big institution taking their profits, causing panic to average joe and noobs, having domino effect. No need for catalyst, probably if there will be some news, it will be just to cause more fuel, encouraging more selling.

Did some research into this because I couldn't remember and it turns out they sold something in 2018. Sometime between March and June 2018, so it was way after the bubble burst. Regarding the BitConnect it seems to have got shut down in middle of January 2018. I think it was that tweet from Vitalik saying "Its most likely a Ponzi" that set them off. I think this was during the time when ETH hit $1400 or so.

So I guess you are right, the bubble bust itself and later it was just a chain of unfortunate events. MtGox issued bankruptcy later in February 2014 while the bubble burst 3 months prior. So it seems that these events basically trigger a faster sell-off rather than reverse the trend of the overall market.

Guys this is not a sharp rise.

Jan 2017 about 1000

Dec 2017 about 20,000 or 20x. in 11 months that is sharp rise in price.




march 2020 about 3900

so 78000 for feb 2021 would be 20 in 11 months

So even if you think there is not enough money in the world to allow a jump of 20x  to 78k

This is money in the world to go to 39k or 10x.

so to me I would be inclined think we would get close to 10x that 3900 price back in march of 2020.

The one thing that can create a bear market and could be a long bear market is imagine Satoshi decides to open the wallet and make some profit with close to 1 million on his wallet that could start a long bear market, I hope he will not do that, so far the wallet is untouched there are so many speculations about the wallet, but everything is still speculation.

News can be a catalyst but the thing is I only focusing on price action and my decisions are relying on what is happening to the price, I'm a technical analyst so chart is my friend and I know when the trend will already finish or when it will already reverse. Right now there is no bearish signs in the market but usually the bearish signs are the bearish divergences, failed to hold to a certain support, breaking down in medium support like 50 MA and breaking down in major support. Those signs of weaknesses and expect a reversal. Try to backtest what happen in the last bull run in 2017 where the price experienced those weaknesses that I mentioned above.

I do not believe that there will be another year long bear market in the crypto ever again. There could be bear periods in crypto, hell we had it in 2020 when the pandemic hit the world, during march and early April we have seen bitcoin price drop to significantly low levels and it took us few months to recover from that and it will be like that in the future as well.

There could be months when bitcoin is low due to some reason but it will recover within few months and go back to where it was. Hopefully 2 months like what happened with this year's drop when it was back up to $10k by early may instead of waiting for a whole year. We are just way too involved with crypto nowadays to let the prices go down that much, there are way too many people and business' that would buy bitcoin in order to stop it from going down that much from now on.

It's difficult to imagine how. But, there is always that possibility. That's 1.

We will know if this happens. I think there is always that one guy who checks his balance.  ;)
With that event, the whole crypto community will be alarmed and after checking, I guess they will panic and sell their bitcoins.
Yeah, it could also happen.
I think one bad event could flip it but the question is what.
What you mentioned has a lower chance but I can't think of something else yet.
It could be one of the top exchanges falling that could create a bear market.

I think it is inappropriate to compare only percentages. Obviously, a 100,000% rise on small volumes will be less significant than a 100% rise on gigantic volumes.
Roughly speaking, if tomorrow some startup grows 10 times, then few people will know about it (this is a common story), but if tomorrow Apple or Microsoft grows/falls by 10%, then all news resources will tell about it.

In the first example (2017) you're measuring that 20x almost from the 2013 ATH. In the second example (2020) you're measuring from the market bottom. This is like comparing night and day.

$1,000 was ~86% of the way to the 2013 ATH. ~86% of the 2017 ATH would be $17K. A 20x from there would be around $340K! Maybe we should be planning on that instead of $78K. ;)

The price itself it already doing a good job on triggering another bear market IMHO since people will see this price as an attractive and profitable way to earn. Of course the whales might have this idea already and are just preparing for a big sell off and by that I mean transferring their Bitcoin from their cold storages to the exchanges so that they can flood the market with sell orders. Right now it won't be the bad news that will trigger the market for me it would really be the high price we are seeing now.

As of now I don't see any catalyst that might trigger the crypto market going bearish.
The only scenario that I see is that if the institutions will dump their Bitcoins one at a time. That might cause a shake and dump in the market as a whole.

Right now, this parabolic rise of Bitcoin is more sustainable compare to where it was last 2017 as I see but I always expect for a retracement or correction to happen possible next year.

Satoshi probably do not even have connection to his wallets anymore. We are talking about amounts reaching over a billion dollars, I am sure if he had any access to his money, he would have done so already, I do not buy into this "he moved on to another project" type of stuff, that doesn't seem to be logical to me, or all of those secretive conspiracies about how it is a secret military operation that will cash out when it is at peak type of deal.

I think he is gone, he is probably dead as well (I am sorry to say this; just for debate), but even if he is not, he is not going to cash out at any price at all and furthermore he can't. Even if he manages to do that one day, I am sure market will crash for a while but we will recover from it for sure, we have recovered from a lot of troubles and we would recover from that too.

Yeah. We are learning after each thing happens what will happen next. When the market is on an up trend, there is a scattering of positive news all around so that everyone starts thinking positively and the market goes well. But suddenly something happens that we can see the impact of in the market. Now Binance is a big exchange, so it is easy to assume that any major incident in binance will have an impact on the market.

2017 didn't have any catalyst, it fell as the result of pure bubble burst. To me it's hard to imagine any possible catalysts for this run, because the things that come to mind could crash Bitcoin to nearly zero - solar flares, nuclear war, global ban, quantum computer that starts claiming all the richest addresses, etc. Luckily, the probability of such events is so small that there's no point in worrying about them, just like, for example, real estate investors don't worry that an asteroid will destroy their property.

We might see another MtGox liquidating some of their funds this year or next year depending on the market situation and if you think that they are the main reason for every correction then we need to find a new excuse this time  :D. As we know the price is sky rocketing and there will be a time that it will crash and when that happens the bears took over.