Almost an year ago on 1.May.2021 the EUR/USD was 1.22. And now it is 0.966, which is a 20.8% crash! If BTC/USD is unpredictable in the next 2.5 years, even more unpredictable is BTC/EUR which is way more important for us the EU citizens. I mean, after 1 year there might be still the same circumstances in play and EUR/USD be even lower. Or the war be over and EU economy gets stronger. So, it is quite possible that in 2 years EUR/USD will be again above 1.20. And if the bear market continues and we bottom at 15K-ish that would mean extremely low prices in EUR like 10K-ish. This is the worst case scenario from hodler's perspective and the best from hardened EU DCAers. Or, it may happen exactly the opposite - disbelief rally to 40K+ paired with EUR/USD around 0.8. Which means getting closer to a new BTC/EUR ATH in a bear market!  

tl;dr. There is absolutely no way to reliably predict BTC/EUR, so better be prepared for both scenarios. This is applied similarly to BTC/GBP.

Today I received 0.00005BTC=1$ in the profile address, which is an old exchange address I never used. What is it - a dusting attack or a treat from a fellow member? Is it safe to withdraw it to HW together with the remaining BTC on another address on that exchange?  

Actually what Jamie Dimon was trying to say is: "Bitcoin is a decentralized network. But JP Morgan together with many other Wall Street institutions are one big centralized Ponzi scheme which is shorting Bitcoin." I couldn't agree more!

May be this is the cancer:

Alameda's bitcoin-denominated loans from Voyager coincide with every major dump in the last few months.



https://twitter.com/FatManTerra/status/1572109451464773633

Me buying the dip 
https://twitter.com/naiivememe/status/1571799284273782784?t=8ysqBbj_azsE-ARi4IC0XA&s=07&fbclid=IwAR1cqRvez-cyNx7zOZMzNTkq64FZEhmtKfTh2t20nUeKG-HTQTR8faOkm_M

Some wall related observation (sorry for being offtopic  ): In a day like this if someone wants the price to drop by 10%, he needs to market sell around 370BTC on Bitsmamp. The bots on all other exchanges will follow immediately and we will never know from where this started. I'm not sure whether the bots follow Gemini, but in that case it would be even easier. Currently 370BTC=$7.4mil. So one needs only $7.4mil to crash the market by 10% and provided he has put $10mil in 100x short positions, this will make a huge profit. I'm not an expert and may be mistaken, but I estimate that the profit would be around 100mil, which of course compensated the $0.7mil loss from the sell.

This is just a simplified example. In reality this process is more complicated and obfuscated in order to delude the exchange owners and regulators. But still, there are more than one Wall Street institutions specialized at such manipulations. And there are also the corrupt exchange owners (e.g. Bitmex) and individual players with that kind of money. I don't follow all exchanges and CME futures, but only on Binance the shorters that cashed out the profits at -10% had a volume > $1bil. And the sharp increase in the previous week suggests that the same amount was bought with the intention to sell it soon.

This is only a speculation, but the probability of some kind of manipulation going on recently is quite high. I can't imagine what the price would've been if there were no manipulations, but 50K would have been the bottom IMO. So, we need patience. Sooner or later these malicious players will be elliminated. Either the spot traders won't follow the crash at some point due to their financial exhaustion (a.k.a bear trap) or SEC will bust them.

I never trust anyone with my finances. No matter how trustworthy Vitalik may look for some. That's why I won't have any more involvement in eth, especially when I know that it has become 100% centralized project. Having said that, I salute the POW which ALWAYS be with the only true decentralized finance - Bitcoin. From that perspective eth POW gave me a chance to start with 1 gaming card in 2016, which make profit and I bought 4 more, then more. And that's how I got into Bitcoin and I am glad I found the financial safe haven. Now etc mining is not profitable anymore, but at least I can use it for heating purposes and hopefully one day the return will be at least 10x.

May be yesterday's 10% flash crash was due to the stonks as it has been the case often in the last years. May be some whale(s) have exploited it to his gains. What I see is that the shorters got a sweet revenge for the liquidations in the past week. Only on Binance, over 1bil short were closed in profit, while over 0.5bil longs were liquidated yesterday. Since this happens on a regular basis I assume that the shorters have much deeper pockets than the longers. And the correlation with the stonks hints of participation of the most fraudulent shorting Wall Street "institutions". This is a cancer much worse than Bitmex was in the previous bear market. The true solution is only one. Keep stacking sats regularly disregarding the price. These 20% oscilations will be insignificant when the price shoots above 100K one day. The longer bears manipulate the market, the better for the DCA-ers! This is how we outplay them.

Even if one has 5K+ BTCs it never makes sense to sell at once losing 7%+ profit. This has been discussed so many times here that it has become a trivial topic.

1. Shorting company manipulating the market.
2. Too many high leverage longs trying to squeeze into 1% increase of the price: at first they are jubilant thinking their chance of getting rich finally has come and then in <1s boom! liquidation (again). So they will try for 1001th time next week.
3. Scaredy-cat daily traders on spot exchange like coinbase, who hastily agree to lose 7% shaken by the fear of losing 10-20% of their last entry price. This game usually ends when their total loss is >90% of their investment throughout a longer period like 1 year.


In the world of finance if someone is making 100x profit by hodling, this always means that at least 100 other unfortunates are making big loss. In the case of BTC the difference is made by knowledge and willpower that most of the people don't have.

Hope is kindled!

It was an easy call, wasn't it? Of course a new wave of longs replaced the liquidated, which may lead to a retest of the bottom. Normally, I despise more the shorters, but I am astounded by the tremendous stubbornness of the longers, provided that nearly 100% of all leveraged long positions have been liquidated in the last year.

I don't know if it is true, but some whale fat finger sold the other day 5K coins that were bought at some peak around 600$. I don't know how does it feel to lose 250 mil by not selling at 69K. Yes, 100mil is a good sum, but not enough for the most luxury yachts. It is just kinda stupid to join right now the bear party of dying ponzis. It kinda reminds me of mindrust, although technically this guy is in huge profit unlike the poor mindrust. I just don't get it, what you can do with such a sum in your bank account? First, paying 40% or more tax, then what? Buying a single boat to brag before your friends? This is so pathetic.

But this is the predictable human psychology. Almost at the same time, each bear cycle there is the capitulation event, when the weak holders are discouraged and decide it is better to bathe in useless paper notes rather than wait 2-3 years and sell at least 10x higher. Although the selling makes sense only if it is for a good reason and not so much about the price. I mean, no price is good enough to sell your coins just for having big amound of fiat junk and not knowing what to do with it.

Anyway, let's see how things will develop from now on. It may be just a small bear trap before the next bull run to 40K in the next 6-7 months.

It looks to me someone tries to defend a massive short position and doing everything possible to hammer the price each time it pops up above 20K. May be it is related to companies like terra, 3ac, celcius, etc. who are ponzis covered up as arbitrage trading firms. And in the bottom of this complex and shady trading is Greyscale, with their insane negative premium (-32%).  Purpose ETF is also dumping hard and also involved in the ponzi scheme.

They all feed with the imbecile gamblers, who keep opening high leverage longs. They've lost so much money so far, yet they continue doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results - the definition of stupidity! Probably tens of billions $ lost in the last 2 years. Currently in Binance there are 1.9bil longs, compared to the average of 1.2bil. Clearly they expect a return above 20K to 24K perhaps. But, there is a catch! During the bear markets the up movement almost always starts after a sudden dip liquidating the leveraged longs. So there is a ~50% chance of going down and ~50% of going up but after a short and steep dip. In other words, they are betting on <1% probability of success. Well done, you are pros! Hopefully this situation will be resolved soon and the demand will return. 20K is sooo low, nothing but heavy manipulation can explain it. Even 40-50K is not a fair price! May be not 100K yet, but I think 60K would correspond best with the increase of demand in the recent years.

So far 2x has worked because of the pace of mass adoption. Judging by some metrics that can be found in glassnode, there is way more than 2x increase of demand each year. The last 10 months were an exception of course, but this can't invalidate the channel. At least not yet. May be after the next halving this will be confirmed. But I have some hope that it won't. The reason is that the invalidation of this model would mean that the demand is losing pace because of the high levels of mass adoption, say above 75%. However, this is not the case. I doubt that more than 5% of the world population holds BTC. So,  there is still plenty of room for growth. The current crisis has other origins and it is a matter of several months to 2 years max to end. My expectations are that in 1 year max BTC will return to the lower line of the 2x channel. After the halving I hope BTC will enter it and score a new ATH > 100K.

Looking at the dynamics of the market in the last 2 months, it seems to me that the potential of the big sellers is starting to run out. Some pitiful attempts are being made with one-off sales at -3% to bring the price down regularly and keep it under 20K, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the market has long been in oversold territory and cannot stay long at such a low price. For example, the leading volume exchange Binance during these months has 3 times the average volume compared to any month in the last 3 years.

It is also clear who is selling - tourists like Tesla and Musk, who understand Bitcoin as well as a calf railway, and also 10+ companies who are struggling not to go bankrupt and are transferring colateral bitcoins to each other like a hot potato. They thought that like with the stocks they would be able to drive down the price of Bitcoin forever, thus paying yield in Bitcoin to their customers. Until their entire house of cards collapsed.

The unfortunates who instead of buying bitcoins (because they are very smart and think they will get them cheaper with leverage) burned to the ground. The only ones who survived were those who bet all the time on short positions and now they think they are the smartest people in the world, but... They are complete wretches like mindrust, and they don't have the brains to realize that one day they will get screwed just like mindrust did to himself.

So, I expect the price to begin leveling off and gradually entering a semi-bull market similarly to both 2015 and 2019. There will be some oscillations, but I expect a clear average price increase of 2-3 times before the next exponential bull market, hopefully in 2025. Yes, it may hit 20K or a little below 20K a few more times, but it is unlikely to break 17.5K anytime soon. It could happen in a few months, if Tesla and other tourists rush to sell again, or if some stable coin explodes. For now, however, the dynamics of the market do not show such signals.

Man, the price chart in the last 10 months looks pretty depressing. Even more than in 2018. And for us the EU citizens it is worsened by the strong $. It adds another 25% to the price depreciation compared to 2021. I really envy those that can buy now, because they will be rewarded soon. I've had some unexpected spendings recently and my DCAing is on hold. Hopefully next month I will be able to resume the buying. Provided I recover well from the nasty surgery and my father recovers from the severe hypertension that has been plaguing him lately. He is still recovering from a hip replacement last year. To add to the bad things, my institution is not paying me well and I'm in the process of getting additional job 400 km from here, with the intention to move to that place eventually. Hopefully all will go well and meanwhile I will be able to resume DCAing. I am not complaining. Although not a millionaire, I have enough money to live without going to work, unless BTC falls below 10K and I sell, which won't happen of course. I eat only restaurant food and enjoy the newest gadgets like the new Asus Zenbook Flip 15 I've bought the other day. And relaxing with my Gretsch ACDC set up. So fuck the misfortunes, I'm good thanks to BTC!  

POW at least gave a chance to millions to get rich by investing in gpu rigs. On the other hand, POS is designed to make the inner circle of Vitalik extremely richer. This is the ultimate centralized project, which has nothing to do with the decentralised and widely adopted BTC. May be there will be some pump around the POS switch, but not if BTC continues to plunge. After that everyone will realize that this is just another buy the rumour sell the news pump and dump. Since staked eth are locked for 12 months and possibly more, there is no way these people to realize a profit, especially in a severe bear market like this. What is 4-5, even 10% yield, while the market is 80-90% down? There is a reason why every other POS coin is practically dead by now. The same will happen with eth, and I doubt it will survive this bear market. It is only a question of when, not if.  

This is a reflection of the state of mind of the people. People are sick physically and mentally, desperate, resigned to inflation, poor health care, the threat of world war, and have lost faith that anything can save them. Even here we don't see optimistic posts anymore. Yes, it's all a speculator's paradise, robbing the weak hands of their bitcoins for a pittance. The situation remains dire indeed and for the first time in Bitcoin history we have had 10 months of non-stop crashing without a rebound. It is very likely to last at least a few more months until the weak hands run out. But that doesn't mean it will be ten years or so before it returns to 60K+ levels. Bitcoin is not like gold and can easily and quickly catch up any lag. And while there were voices before that 20K was accidentally achieved due to the short stay in those levels, this cannot be said at all for the 60K+ levels where the price stayed for months. So this price is totally achievable, from where we can also expect the 100K+ to come true within the next 3-4 years.

I expected 42K to be a major resistance but 25K, really? Why nobody is buying? I would sell everything just to buy more at these prices. Is this the top of the recovery? At least the progress is way too slow. May be my expectations for 30K+ by the end of the year were too optimistic and we will grind to hold the bottom 17.5K. Let's hope 25K will fall soon, otherwise...