Bitcoin Forum

Pretty often the explanations, why Bitcoin soared up or crashed down are "pulled by the ears", and have little to do with reality. Do you think that this is also the case with this Forbes article? Or was the recent surge really caused by the PayPal announcement about supporting Bitcoin buying and spending services, and Forbes is right in saying that "this rally is much more sustainable than 2017"?

Please share your thoughts.

Read in full:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2020/11/25/is-this-the-real-reason-bitcoin-has-suddenly-soared-toward-its-all-time-highs/

I think there are a lot more reasons than just PP, but it's still news that people will understand much better than when someone serves them stories about Grayscale or MicroStrategy. Therefore, the PP deal was potentiated as something that caused growth - but before that news BTC stood quite well - although it is now pointless to talk about what would have happened if PP had not entered the crypto business.

As for the story of similarities and differences in the relationship with 2017 - 2020, pure logic tells us that these are two completely different situations where you can practically see the effect of many small investors during 2017 compared to several large ones investing over the past 6 months.

If the chart from the article is to be believed, then it is clear that PP is buying increasing amounts of BTC, and that they will increase more and more - which means that they are becoming serious players in the crypto market. Of course as far as I know this service is only available in the US for now, and when it becomes available globally we can expect their appetite for BTC to increase drastically.

So now it's a question of who would more likely to back off, causing the price crash, small investors or large ones? I personally think that it's possible for a few large investors to agree between themselves about keeping the price from crashing, while it was completely impossible for many small investors to do that back in 2018.

We can look at it from several angles because it is definitely not a one-way street. If we look from the angle of those big investors who have invested significant funds in Bitcoin then it is in their interest for the price to be stable or to go up - but on the other hand if they want to invest even more than a lower price would certainly suit them. They can affect the price to some extent if they don’t sell what they bought on every change like this recent downturn - but I don’t believe they can work together in terms of some internal arrangements.

Small investors who have no discipline, and those who always seek profit by sticking to the old rule of “buy low, sell high” generally behave like a herd that always goes in one direction, of course depending on the situation. The recent dump is just an indicator of how panic works and how weak hands perceive the current situation compared to what happened in late 2017 and early 2018. If someone thinks the price is going towards $3000 and that we are entering crypto winter again, he is in the wrong year.

Yeah.  Often the "buy low, sell high" turns into a "buy high, sell lower when they panic because bitcoin or anything else doesn't go straight up."  The long term, large investors who are not traders are much more likely to realize that sometimes the price goes up, sometimes it goes down over the short term, but with the exception of a week or two in 2017 (and a day or so this week) *anyone* who bought bitcoin and held for any reasonable period of time is way ahead of the game.

The smart investors know that the odds favor this continuing because they know that (a) other people realize the value proposition as they do also, (b) more and more people will want something to protect themselves and a percentage of their assets and (c) consequently there will be more demand long term with a fixed supply.

Day to day traders are much less lucky since while the long term odds favor a higher price, the short term trades have no such odds. 

It's not rocket science. The exchange rates started going up immediately after it was known that PayPal is working towards integrating Bitcoin to its platform. The first part of the bull run was purely driven by hype, and the second phase had more to do with the supply crunch. As per Pantera Capital, the demand from PayPal and Square is more than the fresh supply of mined coins. The correction phase is underway right now, and we can expect the bull run to resume within a short period.

50% of volume for bitcoin is in USDT. All the articles and stories about this bull market appear to ignore that iFinex, Tether, Bitfinex's issuance of USDT which might be issued to exchanges as loans is the real reason for this pump.

My thoughts exactly! That's what I liked in this Forbes article the most:


I also like the fact that it's Forbes, and not some crypto-oriented media, always biased towards the good news regarding cryptocurrencies.

The main reason that some people are rich and become even richer is that they invest in the long run, and they also have money that they can invest with the risk of losing it. If you take the example of an ordinary Joe who works 6 days a week for an average salary, and who 5-6 years ago decided to invest a few hundred dollars in BTC, and sold them at the last ATH or did it these days - he is how you say "ahead of the game.".

Yet such people are rare, and those others who want to play the game with the big players will sooner or later be defeated in one way or another. But in this game there must always be those who lose and those who gain - if it were not so the world would be completely different and 90% of the world's wealth would not be under the control of 10% of people.

In my eyes the 2017 rally, which actually started in 2015, was very sustainable, it lasted for more than 2 years and brought the price from $200 to nearly $20,000, and even after the crash, the price was still tremendously higher than where it was at the begging. If this rally would be as "sustainable" as the 2015-2017 rally, we could look at reliable $60-80k price ranges in a few years.

It's only from the perspective of people who entered close to the ATH that rally wasn't sustainable.

There are different ways of looking in to it. By mid-2015, the exchange rates had hit rock bottom at around $200 per coin. This represented 85% decline from the ATH levels of 2013 December. Then there was a small recovery, and the prices reached $900 per coin by 2017 January (which was still 20% lower than the 2013 ATH level). I would rather consider the movement from 2015 to 2017 January as a "recovery", rather than a "rally". IMO, the rally started in Q1 2017 and lasted for less than 12 months.

Mainstream news media will always publish what they will give them more clicks. If this was during the bear market, they will create another bitcoin is a bubble storyboard again.

Yeah, that's true. They will do whatever it takes to stretch the narrative in order to keep monetizing on bitcoin as long as possible. The number of so-called crypto journalists is on the rise and I am not surprised at all.
They need to eat, hence they will write crap as long as they can.
I tend to skip all the price related news anyway because I know what I will find in it.

I think by "2017 rally" they, Forbes, mean a shorter period of time, starting mid September 2017. That's when Bitcoin really jumped big, from $3,600 to $19,000 three months later. And the current rally has started in the end of September 2020, with BTC at around $11k, and if it is indeed a more more sustainable one, we can expect Bitcoin going over $60k in 2-3 months from now.

I don't know whether we will have similar bull run or not, but we can expect it to last at least 3 months. The demand is looking robust right now and if the additional supply is completely removed from the market then $60K or even $100K may be possible within 2021. The current rally is supported by solid fundamentals, so it is very much probable.

All things will depend if the demand would really be there on next year to come.It isnt safe to presume about 60k or 100k in 2021 yet breaking the previous high is already a challenge.
How much more if we do talk into those digits? Lots of reason that people presume out on what happened on that 2017 bull run and then suddenly popped out and crashed the market
going below in 3k and now we do see the similar scenario on rising up the price in last quarter of this year which we can say that it is totally the same in that particular year.
Comparing the news of adoption between those times then theres really some big changes thats why i do see that the price will be tanking somewhat.

I think the main difference between the 2017's and current bull runs is that after seeing the downfall from $20k to $3k, most people became sceptical about Bitcoin future, and it seemed that nothing could make them to believe that BTC will ever recover, let alone surpass the previous ATH. Yet, we are almost there today.

One week after the article form the OP was published, watching how the events unfold, I can say that I agree with Forbes regarding PayPal being the main reason of the current bull run and the sustainability to it.

I am not certain if many of them are deserving to be called journalists hehehe. They are only mouth pieces for the companies that are paying them to advertise and larp.

Those journalists reported that China holds the funds of the Plustoken scam which was wrong. They never investigated that those funds have moved with the help of Chaindigg, a Chinese blockchain analytics company and were dumped with the help Huobi and Okex.

Also, those journalists should also investigate Tether and the unaudited issuance of USDT that appears to have a connection with bitcoin's pump.