In the short term, I think we were in bubble territory when we were up around $5k.  Obviously that bubble has deflated somewhat since then, but I'm not sure it's really gone yet.  If we get below $2k, I think we're definitely out of short-term bubble territory.  In between is hard to say.

Long term, I think that bitcoin is either growing in a healthy manner (i.e., it's not a bubble), or it's one of the most epic bubbles in the history of the world.  Only time will tell which of those is correct.

Does anyone have any idea where a lot of the big Chinese miners are located?  Is it possible that they could move their mining operations elsewhere if China actually bans mining?  I'm guessing that they're not very mobile, so it may not be worth trying to move.  But that may be more appealing than trying to liquidate all of their equipment.

Yes. 

First, what do you mean by bear market?  A common definition of a bear market in the stock market is when a financial instrument is down at least 20% from its high.  If you use that definition, we're already there.  If not, are we talking about the price being lower at the end of Q4 than at the beginning?  Or are we talking about another move lower, below $3k?  The details of exactly what happens are anyone's guess.  The author of that article gives compelling reasons for why bitcoin could go lower in the short term, but ultimately it's up to the market, and so I think it's important to look at price and volume to see what the market is telling us.

Here's my take: we had a blink-and-its-over crash and bounce off $3k, and we've been stuck in a (rather large) trading range since then.  I feel like the market is looking for a reason to go higher, but it's having trouble finding one right now.  Without something significantly positive, we're going to have trouble breaking up into the mid $4000s.  Many times, jarring market moves will have some sort of follow-through (e.g., crash-bounce-crash).  Additionally, a bounce on weak volume, as pointed out in the article, shows little interest in reversing the trend (and making it positive again), which does point to a fragile market that could easily crash again on more bad news.  Market participants need a reason to buy.  Without one, I think that the odds currently favor another leg down.

I had a thought: all of these predictions are predicated on the belief that the US dollar will roughly maintain its value.  While this appears to be true for at least the near future, a US financial crisis, especially if it involves the US treasury markets, has the potential to be catastrophic to the dollar.  If the world actually starts caring about the US national debt, there's a chance we could end up with a huge debt crisis like Greece, Spain, etc.  If that happens, the dollar may crumble, which would lead to a higher USD/BTC exchange rate.

I think that bitcoin reaching $25k, $50k, or maybe even $100k in the next 5 years might be possible.  But I don't think it's going to be $1M.  With around 18M bitcoins mined, $1M per bitcoin would mean a market cap of $18T.  Now I realize that market cap is simply price times the number of bitcoins, but $18T is about the GDP of the entire USA right now.  It would take a lot of huge investors (banks, hedge funds, millionaires/billionaires) to get us anywhere close to that point.

Agreed--the Chinese miners would be the ones who are screwed.  If the link someone posted near the beginning is correct, then China is responsible for about 80% of the network hash rate.  If all of that disappeared overnight, the network would slow down by a factor of about 5, but once the difficulty retargets, things will be fine again.  The only danger there would be if other miners gave up on mining because of the increased block time, but it would be in all the miners' best interests to continue mining so their bitcoin is still worth something.

There's a difference between stopping bitcoin and making it worth much less than it is now.  I don't think governments could actually stop bitcoin.  There's no way they can effectively police the internet and block the network.  However, they could still ban bitcoin and put the exchanges out of business, which, like you said, would cause investors who are in bitcoin to make money to dump everything.

To be more useful as a currency, bitcoin needs to be less volatile.

As many have said, the decentralized nature of bitcoin, without a central authority to help control the price, increases the volatility.

But if you really want to decrease the volatility, you need some way of determining the value of a bitcoin.  If market participants knew, for example, that the value of a bitcoin was around $4,000, then price should stay in a tight trading range around that value, unless it was believed for some reason that the value was going to change significantly in the future.  Without this, bitcoin price is going to continue to swing wildly back and forth.

The network hash rate has just as much--if not more--to do with where miners think the price will go as it does with what the current price is.  The price of bitcoin can dip, but if the miners believe it will go back up again, they will continue to mine, even if it is unprofitable for a short period of time.  Only if price is not expected to recover will they start turning off their equipment.

China is not the huge player that it used to be.  They were instrumental in the last price spike to ~$1100, but the percentage of daily volume that Chinese trading represents is no where close to a majority anymore.  In the long run, the China ban isn't going to do much.  And should China allow bitcoin again one day, we should get quite a rally from the news.

Yes, but I don't think it has much to do with bitcoin being crazy, which I assume is a reference to its volatility.  In some ways, bitcoin price might actually be easier to predict than other financial markets.  From what I've heard, as well as some of my own limited observations, bitcoin tends to follow predictable technical patterns (double top/bottom, head and shoulders, reversals on divergence, etc.) fairly often, which is not as often the case with other financial markets.  The difficulty comes from the enormous complexity of trying to model a financial market.  Your model has to be pretty accurate if you're going to remain profitable over the long term.  Trying to figure out all the major factors that go into determining price is a very difficult task.

Another reason I think $30k is reasonable is that there still seems to be a lot of potential for new investors.  Access to the bitcoin market is still not trivial, and there's a lot of skepticism that may be keeping some investors away.  We really need a few institutional investors to jump in with tens of millions of dollars or more.  Yes, banks do seem to be against bitcoin right now (or at least Dimon has been making a big stink lately), but at some point they may start to realize (if they haven't already) that they could manipulate bitcoin for increasing their own profits.  If they start jumping into the market, it could skyrocket like we've never seen before.

What's the nature of your AI program?  Is it something you've designed, something someone has made for you, a commercial product you've seen, ...?  I haven't worked with AI myself, but from what I know of it, it's very hard to design good predictive algorithms, especially for financial markets because there's quite a bit of chaos that simply cannot be predicted.  It's also hard to deal with changing market personality over time.  An algorithm that works great this year may fail miserably next year.  I watched an AI program that someone else made for trading futures markets.  Overall, it was quite profitable for about a year and a half, after which it quickly lost most of the money that people invested with it.

I'm curious: if you think $15k is possible, why not $30k?

One reason that people see $30k+ as a possibility is based on the market cap.  By 2020, I think there should be around 18M bitcoins that have been mined.  Multiplying that by $30k gives you $540B.  The market caps of the some of the biggest companies are comparable.  For example, Apple's market cap is about $785B right now.  So a market cap of $540B seems reasonable.

How is buying when price is low different from buying on a pullback?  If you're not buying on a pullback, then you're buying higher, at least in the short term.  Or do you mean it's better to wait for some kind of price consolidation?  Usually, buying on a pullback does not mean buying as it's dropping.  It means you buy either when it looks like price is leveling off in a pullback, or you buy as price is just starting to rise as it exits a pullback.

How do you define a bear market in bitcoin?  In other financial markets, like stocks, a bear market is usually defined as a period when price is off its high by 20% or more.  If you use that definition, bitcoin is in a bear market as long as it's below ~$4k (i.e., we've been in one for a week).

It is indeed wise to keep this mind.  All auction-style financial markets (like bitcoin) try to predict what the price will be in the future.  Especially when an event like the fork is known well ahead of time, the market will either increase or decrease leading up to the fork, depending on whether the general belief is that the fork will have a positive or negative impact on bitcoin and its price.  When the fork actually happens, if the result is as the market predicted, you may see little reaction to the event.  But if the market gets it wrong, then you may see huge price swings as price catches up to reality.

I don't think we need a long bear market to have another drop.  A lot of corrections tend to have at least a couple of waves down.  The first major one bounced around $3k.  If we do get another wave lower, it could be just as quick and decisive.  The bounce around the $3500 area yesterday indicated some good support there.  But if that breaks, we could fall to $3k in a matter of hours, and if that doesn't hold, we'll get another quick drop down by several hundred more.

What's the current word on that hard fork?  Is it projected to be as controversial as the bitcoin cash fork?  As for the current consolidation area, you may be right, given how volatile bitcoin is.  I guess by "for a while" I was thinking like a week or two...a while in bitcoin terms, but not long compared to other financial markets.

As ironic as it may sound, if we can't break above ~$4k soon, a crash below $2k may be just what we need to resume the bull market.  There's too much indecision right now.  If we drop a lot lower, the decision will become clear again: buy.  A good bounce off of $3k again to form a solid double-bottom might also be enough.

As an absolute value, $30k sounds like a lot.  But on percentage terms (600% of the recent peak of $5k), it's in line with some of the other crazy rallies we've had in the past.  Right now, I feel like we're in a holding pattern, possibly waiting for either some more good news or bad news to drive price one way or the other.  We may be stuck in this trading range for a while.

If you're planning to hold on to your bitcoins for years, then you are absolutely correct.  There's no need to obsess over the day-to-day price gyrations.  If you're trying to grow the number of coins you have by trading, then it matters a lot more.  Either way, however, I think it is important to keep track of the price and news over time.  There are still--and always will be--risks to bitcoin's price.  I think it would be unwise to hold it blindly for 20 years.