We're grasping at straws here, that's true, but patterns are a known way of predicting market moves. The more people see the pattern the more likely your prophecy will fulfill.
Most market indicators have their flaws. Pi cycle top indicated that 60k in April was the top, but there was another top close to 70k months later, so the indicator was ~10% short.


Call it what you want, but you have to agree that it's been pretty good at showing buy zones in the past. Usually when it goes to yearly lows, the sellers are becoming exhausted. As an investor you should look for extreme panic, a time when people aren't thinking straight anymore and those who held through initial selloffs get tired of waking up to red candles.

Human psychology is always the same and I know it because I've been through it in 2018 when I actually made money and was at a profit, but the long bear market made me quit the forum and stop watching charts. I had enough of constant negativity and even considered selling, but taking a break and focusing on something else helped me to get through this.


Chinese new years had more impact when China was still in the trading game. Now it's more of a "I don't know what's going on, but people are selling so maybe it's time to sell" game.

^
That's right, Russia doesn't care about NATO. Some of you may not be aware, but the pact requires each country to act if one of their allies is attacked, but id does not specify what actions should be taken.
The actions can mean a blockade, a trade embargo, sending supplies to the attacked country. People think that if a NATO member is attacked all other members will destroy the attacker, but that wouldn't be the case and Russia knows it. I bet that if they attacked Ukraine nobody would do anything. NATO is already saying that it won't do anything and Russia will make sure Ukraine doesn't become a member, just to play it safe.

Thanks for the input. I chose this section because I didn't want the thread to be too technical or too political. It's also not about trading but rather not getting rid of your coins after a 45% drop in price without considering the bullish case.

You are right, but I feel like the market is becoming more mature. There's less speculators and more strong hands. People compare market cycles thinking it will play out the same way every time (20x up and then 85% down in a year of bear) but It's not going to be like that. This would be too easy to predict and too linear.



 

I wouldn't call it very bad Especially the lower low in 2009. It's my answer to OP's chart because I've seen people pointing out that as loing as Bitcoin doesn't hit a lower low vs last year it will bounce back up. S&P clearly hit a lower low in 2009 and bounced back up after that.
BTC had its own global crisis. Imagine the fear people felt when the biggest exchange took all their money and shut down, or when China banned mining. To a small economy like that it was a n event comparable to a country declaring bankruptcy and you could see it indicated by the price. IMO if we ever go back to 3k it's going to be a flash crash caused by a liquidation cascade. Such things have nothing to do with the real value. I've long argued that exchange price of Bitcoin does not fully represent its value. You need to count yearly average for that.

Since I can see the fear and pressure some of you are under at this point, I'd like to offer some advice and a bit of analysis of the market. Maybe this will put those of you who are biting their nails and watching the charts all day long at ease. Hodlers probably won't learn anything new here, but I at least hope that those who think the sky is falling will.

Let me start by saying that the things you can read in both the mania and extreme fear are one of a kind. Especially on youtube you can see and see some weird mix of panic, hate, resentment and sarcasm. No, Bitcoin is not going to $1, $100, $1000 or anything in between. The protocol is intact, the hash power is growing, this Bitcoin that people are selling now at a loss below 40k is actually a stronger, better Bitcoin than the one they were buying for 40k in January 2020.

You're probably thinking that if everything is fine then what caused it to crash and why 30k again? There's so many people who feel fooled by media and youtubers. It was supposed to be at 100k, right?
There's so many factors that influence the price that it's impossible to predict the exact value and time. There's external and internal factors, with internals being the number of users, nodes, network upgrades, hash power, difficulty, number of transactions. External factors are things like the stock market, the attitude of various governments, pandemics, wars and so on.
In 2013 it was mostly internal with the biggest exchange declaring bankruptcy, while the March 2020 market crash is a nice example of an external influence (US stock market covid crash)

Unlike the external ones, internal problems cause a prolonged loss of confidence in the asset, so they're much worse.

IMO we are currently facing a bearish correction due to external factors. High inflation all over the world with countries like USA, Turkey, Russia and Poland really struggling to fight it. Most of them try to increase interest rates, which means that companies who are in debt are forced to pay more interest and any future loan is going to cost them more. Naturally this is going to slow them down and make investors (who also have to pay higher interest on their loans) to sell some assets to be able to cover that increase. This is why the stock market is going down and dragging Bitcoin along.

Is it bad overall? Sure, but is it bad for Bitcoin? Not really, because it's still the same Bitcoin, just people don't have enough money to keep buying and since we are mining more every day, with less buyers Bitcoin is naturally going to keep falling in price.

Silver lining? Of course there is one. First of all, the stocks are not going to keep falling forever. The governments know that they can't let this go too far or companies start going bankrupt, which means less taxes and unemployed people on the streets waiting for another round of stimulus checks. They are going to start printing money and lowering rates, which will push the stocks and bitcoin up.

There's also some technicals for those of you who like these things.
The similarity among this price action and other historical events is striking.

We are going through Spring of 2021 all over again. You can see that there's much less volume this time because we've been witnessing an outflow of coins from exchanges all throughout last year.

Why shouldn't you panic?
1. Fear is at extreme levels in both the fear and greed index and on social media. The blood is definitely on the streets.
2. The RSI is at one of its lowest levels in history, around the value where it was in March of 2020. Historically such a low RSI hasn't happened more than once per year and always indicated a good buying opportunity.
3. In the previous cycles we clearly had an overheated top, that was followed by a 50% move to the downside and a dead cat bounce (a lower high followed by a lower low). This time there was no such thing and we've reach the oversold area without even correcting 50%. In the previous cycles the price had to correct 70% or more to become oversold on the RSI.
4. The fundamentals remain the same.

If that's not enough for you, calm down and think about it for a moment. A year ago people were happy to see 30k, now they panic at 35k. We tend to see the negative side of things, despite common sense. If someone gives you $100 and the next day demands $80 back, you'll be reluctant to give it away. All you'll feel is regret that he gave you something and then came back to take it away, completely ignoring the fact that he gave you $20 for free.

Most people can't stand a little bit of pressure and succumb to it. They want for it to stop already, even if it means turning this pressure into regret. When you hold an asset that's 10% down you just want it to stop and go up, but when it goes down another 10% and another, you sell just to be able to get on with your life. That's why bear markets always take longer and go deeper than they should, without any fundamental reason.

I feel that retail capitulation was in December. Many indicators show that most weak hands were actually flushed back then. You can find a number of similarities in the current correction with the ones in the past, especially if you look at the RSI.

The first big weak hand flush out was in 2020 when we hit 30k. Then scared retail investors waited longer, so they did not enter at 40k, most of them waited longer to around 60k, which is why we had a higher high back then. Smart money took positions at 35-40k and retail was scared of a lower high so they went in later and pushed the price to 69k, but it was the same retail that got flushed in Spring, with no FOMO crowd, which is why the top was so low. There was no mania phase this time.

You can also see this by comparing the big capitulation candles in May and December. The first one happened later and went deeper down because retail bought earlier and could hold longer in the falling market. (40-30k) In December the candle started higher (50k-40k) which indicates that retail was pushed to the limit at higher prices. They waited longer with their buys and bought closer to the peak.

IMO this is good because it indicates that smart money entry level was higher in Q4 2020 than in Q1, which suggests that a low should also be higher. There's more long term holders at higher levels now than in Spring.

In an extreme bearish scenario where the stock market goes down another 20% or more it could force miners to sell at a loss and break this pattern, but your chart is one of the reasons why I think people who wait for 10 or 15k bitcoin will end up like those who waited for 1k bitcoin in 2019.


This is what analysts call "lengthening cycles with diminishing returns". That's actually one of the bitcoin market theories.

I'm not a fan of the wave theory, but it sure looks plausible and logical. There's a number of market theories right now and one of them states that we're going to be in a constant bull market with corrections within the bull trend from now on. If you look at the charts and zoom out back to 2017 you'll see that every single bubble (or FOMO ) market ended with a top and a very steep 50% drop.
In 2017 it all played out in a month. We needed about a week to correct 50% and another 2 weeks to reach -75%. This time 3 months in and we are barely touching 45% correction. For me this is a sign of strength in the market.

Note that charts can be very misleading. Even if we were to form a lower low here it's not over because this is driven by external conditions (the stock market). A bounce back on stocks will drive bitcoin up no matter at what level it will be. Check out the chart below. S&P500 had a lower low in 2008/9 and recovered. This whole part between 95 and 09 looks very much like bitcoin from mid 2020 until now.

At the same time latest articles from this week say that it will take place in February. Did someone get cold feet?
Mike's at the age when you never know how you'll feel tomorrow. When you go to bed you don't know if you'll wake up. The guy is a legend, but when you're pushing 60 everything weakens starting from reflexes and ending with bone structure. He could really damage himself with this fight.

There are bull and bear markets within a single big bull trend. To see it you just need to zoom out a bit
Somebody did the math for that and the average yearly profit from holding Bitcoin over the last 12 years was close to 100%. This means that if you held the USD you got -2% a year, If you held the Lira -10% and that stupid little bearish bitcoin was averaging at +100%.

My way of checking what's up with BTC is comparing the yearly lows.
https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1412516711040000002/photo/1

It appears that it's possible to mine cryptocurrency using Tesla's built in graphics card and it can be efficient, but you still need free power and a tesla. This means that you need to spend $5k on solar panels and buy the car, that isn't cheap and all you'll get from it is ~10 bucks a day.


Also, hacking into tesla's OS voids warranty, so there's that... Might be a god idea if you already own the car and solar panels and get sick/break a leg and can't drive for a while. If the car just sits there and collects dust it can at least do some mining.

Thanks Ultegra134.

We were getting signs of sideways accumulation period at 40k, but the recent stock market drop pushed us over the edge. I don't think we can call it a crash yet, but it's bad for some co0mpanies like Netflix that lost over 20%. If you look at US stocks, they had their highs last year, just like Bitcoin.

The demand will continue to rise the lower we get. For instance, the rich keep buying. Just take a look at what this address is doing. It kept adding to its balance every time Bitcoin had a drop, since November. It bought at 50, 40 and now 30k.
https://btc.com/btc/address/1P5ZEDWTKTFGxQjZphgWPQUpe554WKDfHQ
There was also a huge (1 billion) USDt transfer to binance today.

We can divide BTC price action into fueled by internal and external factors. Internal ones are usually problematic for the long run, like the Gox bankruptcy. External problems may look bad at first but are really a great entry points even for the short-term investor. A good example of such external problems was the US lockdown crash of 2020.

I don't think that 20k is impossible, just that IMO we have 50/50 chance of holding 30k, or going lower towards 20, but IMO 15 is improbable for many reasons like moving averages, bitcoin history of always holding the last ATH when it's been breached for the second time, round numbers like 20k being key targets for most people, crowd mentality and so on.

That 13k you're pointing at was a pandemic flash crash when USA announced total lockdown. It was something we call a black swan event, pretty much comparable to a big terrorist attack, beginning of an armed conflict and so on. I don't think we can simply bleed for a year until we finally reach 13k again.




Please... Google how many times in the last 10 years people said that it's over and the next stop is $1, 0, or some other low number.
Global mining is worth billions of USD, we have more investments in the space than we've had at 10 or 15k per coin. We have more users, more hash power, more companies involved. If we couldn't reach $1 in 2014 when Mt. Gox collapsed, we will not see it now.  

In fact, a $100k bitcoin is much more probable than a $1k bitcoin.

I find it to be funny that this time last year people were celebrating 30k USD and today everybody is sad because we're only at 30k.
Curb your expectations! Buy now and don't look at the price until 2023 and you'll thank me for it.


It's always darkest right before the dawn.
For all of you, who are scared now, here's a thread from last year, when people were saying the same thing, that it's all over, it's bear market, we will keep falling for years, and 3 months later BTC was at a new high.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5331595.new#new

They have no idea why it went down so they look for any news to explain it.
I don't believe the price crashed because of Russia, especially since the country has been known for its hostility towards bitcoin and attempts to create their own centralized cryptocurrency. They had pretty much similar attitude as China since like 2018 or 19.

The stock market is crashing and it's dragging everything along with it. Oil prices have dropped, gold and silver went down, stocks and cryptos went down. We're not the only ones losing money on the global markets.

Things to consider:
1. 4 year cycle theory is IMO less plausible than the lengthening cycle theory.
If you're not familiar with this one it basically compares how many days it took Bitcoin to reach the top from the bottom of the bear market and in every cycle this number is higher.
2. Big bear market lows like those 70-80% usually happened after an overheated top, like in 2017 when we had 20x gains from the previous ATH. This time there was no such thing and you could see that in the fear index reaching values below 20 after a 25% correction.
Usually big gains mean deep, prolonged corrections, but the last bull run was pretty weak, which suggests a weak correction. 
3. As market matures it's natural for the fomo rallies to become less common and less volatile and it's the same with corrections.
4. Most people overshoot with their predictions.You could see it in the last bear market when know traders and youtubers were expecting 1k and it all ended at 3k. It's the same every time and right now a lot of people expect 20k, which is why I believe we'll never get there.

IMO 29k will hold. The lowest I'd expect to see would be 20k, with a possible wick down to 19k with enough panic, but there's going to be such a wall of buys at that level that if we start going towards 20 it will get short squeezed to 25.

Long term I see 2 options. We hold 30k and go back up to 40 and if that breaks to a new ATH.
We'll lose 30 and go down towards 20 where the correction will end.

It will all play out in the next 3 months. I don't see a 2 year long bear market ahead, unless the stock market goes -50%.

Wrong section mate.
Move this to  Marketplace > Goods > Digital goods > Invites & Accounts

You can already see he's biased and full of regret. Trading is not gambling, but it's not for idiots either. You can be a trader who trades with 10% of his money, waits for a big positive signal to buy and a trully negative signal to sell. Like when you buy after the price breaks the old ATH and don't trade with leverage, that's pretty smart. Holding long term and exiting with some money every time the price goes 2x is also smart. Going in with all your money on a trade with 20x leverage is the fastest way to a homeless shelter or a rehab and this guy is a living proof.

I don't find it boring because there's always some drama brewing, like it used to be with BCH and BSV. Now there's this ETH will flip Bitcoin narrative. If you have a lot of money invested and care enough to follow the price and read the headlines it's not boring, believe me. Gold is boring too, stocks can be boring if you invest in government stuff. It can bore me as long as it's profitable.

Do not be worried. Most of this crash originated on 2 exchanges conveniently located in Singapore, so the Chinese were selling exactly on the day when El Salvador officially recognized bitcoin as currency. This was a move to scare people, not some coincidence. The crash was too fast and it's going to happen again because of low liquidity on exchanges.
Manipulation matters only if you allow yourself to be manipulated.