maybe for dan morehead's 5 month time window, but i think it's quite likely within a year or so. the monthly BTC trend is way too powerful to be ignored---this doesn't look like a bull trap like summer 2014. by all appearances, we've already begun another bull cycle like 2016-17. and if that's true, then we're about to go a lot further than $42k.

looks super unlikely now with the daily close 4 hours away. all i see is weak bounces interchanging with dumps. as long as we continue these lower highs and lower lows, there's no reason to get bullish yet. i think we're on track for a retest of $9k and possibly lower.

it's not about what people think will happen.

it's the fact that price reached a certain point, eg $19666 in 2017, and sellers began to finally outnumber buyers. in other words, everyone who was willing to buy at that price already bought. but there were still lots of people who wanted to sell. this excess supply pushing into weak demand started pushing price down.

the price decline creates a feedback effect in the market: holders are pressured to sell to lock in profits or cut losses, and buyers stop buying for fear of the falling prices.

the tricky thing is, you can only know this happened in hindsight. in real time, it could just be a short term correction. at first, after we hit $19666, nobody thought it was the top. until it fell, and fell, and......fell. eventually it was obvious......in hindsight.

illegal money isn't interchangeable with illegal drugs. drugs have real consumptive value, so addicts and recreational users will make a market no matter what the law says.

but money doesn't have such consumptive value. its value is based purely on the faith and confidence of its users. if a cryptocurrency is declared illegal, you don't think that would shake the confidence of its users? you don't think liquidity would utterly vanish as it's pulled from exchanges? of course they couldn't kill it, but they could probably drastically cut the market down in size. and for monero, that would mean making its anonymity set much less effective. is that futile?

maybe it isn't so black and white. there are lots of possibilities for bitcoin between "completely fungible" and "completely infungible".

i think these investors are just hedging against the worst possible outcome for their own bitcoins. they don't want to be blindsided one day when they go to cash out millions of dollars, only to find out their OTC buy came from the world's largest darknet heroin smuggler.

i don't think they are making an assumption that every bitcoin in existence will be virtually unspendable. they're just buying an insurance policy against the unknown.

the investors paying a premium for newly mined coins are obviously in it for the long haul---years, if not decades. they're hedging against pretty paranoid legal fears that would take years to come to fruition, like regulators freezing bitcoins because of taint regardless of whether and where they were provably, legitimately bought.


there's only ever one early adoption phase. i guess some investors are happy to pay a premium (what is it anyway, 5-10%?) for a shot at huge exponential gains where the returns are unimpeachable. it seems overkill to me, but if their paranoia turns out correct it'll have been worth it for sure.

meh, this activity is pretty typical after FUD like this. bitfinex has seen multiple large exoduses from their cold wallet after actions by the CFTC, DOJ, NYAG......federal agencies in the USA take forever to bring cases forth too. things will probably return to normal pretty soon.


i don't think the market cares. the price stayed sideways after news of the CFTC probe, and then shot up past $11k a day later.

on the contrary, bitcoin's volatility just makes it so we can enter/exit trades more often. TA still works just like any other market.


even good traders/analysts are wrong all the time. that doesn't mean TA doesn't work per se, it just means 1. markets are unpredictable and profitable methods don't work 100% of the time and 2. lots of traders don't apply TA correctly.

it looks like the push to $11k was just a bull trap after all. we're back in the $9000s again as we speak.

yeah they don't allow depositing/withdrawing coins. for almost 2 years, they've been "evaluating features to allow you to safely transfer coins to and from robinhood". it's just exposure, like a bucket shop. https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001284443-Cryptocurrency-Transfers-and-Deposits

their "no fee" model and slick interface is tempting for noobs i'm sure. i wouldn't touch them.

i certainly do. i'm still betting we go no lower than $8k. anything in the $8000s is a solid buy. price won't stay down there for long---strong v-bottom expected.


too low. bears are already getting greedy, i can feel it. by the time we're bottoming in the $8000s or $9000s, they'll be aiming for $6k again.

call me crazy, but double the market cap of gold doesn't seem too outlandish to me. i dunno about timing, but i could see it happening within the next decade maybe.

people underestimate just how limited the supply is---21 million coins (20% of which might be lost), for 8 billion people, investment banks/asset managers, central banks? most of the supply will probably be sucked into a black hole, hoarded away. i could see $10 million happening in my lifetime too.

it's possible neither one is lying. bitfinex has always been open about the fact that they allow foreign organized ECPs that might otherwise be defined as US persons. the prosecutors seem to be asserting that that these are still new york entities. i don't think any of us know new york law well enough to say one way or the other.

for years, i've been hearing about investors who are paying a premium for freshly mined coins. they don't know how regulators and law enforcement will view taint in the future, and they don't want to be associated with any unlawful or questionable behavior just in case. i think it's a little ridiculous, but then again, i also recognize that fungibility isn't perfect in bitcoin.

it never occurred to me that freshly mined coins could also be valuable to money launderers, but it makes sense for the same reasons.

you can't forget about supply. the full mechanism for price discovery is supply and demand.

if demand increases by x but supply also increases by x, then the price will remain the same. so when demand outweighs supply, price rises. when supply outweighs demand, price falls.

this is still an oversimplification of course, but it's a better model than only focusing on demand.

i don't like to read too much into these metrics---same with total number of addresses or total number of blockchain.info wallets. these stats can be easily gamed. we can't actually tell how many "people" control those addresses. if one bitcoin whale were so inclined, he could make himself look like many thousands of "bitcoinaires". just sayin!

i don't think they actually know for sure. initiating a withdrawal triggers fraud/due diligence checks which differ on a case-by-case basis. then there are possible delays from the customer's bank (or intermediary banks in the case of wires).

so they give you a time window that indicates the latest time you'll receive it, which seems like the best we can expect. anytime i've confirmed a bank withdrawal from coinbase pro, the confirmation says "coinbase_payout_at: xxxxx" where xxxxx is the latest date the ACH will hit my account. it's always hit my account earlier than that.

doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

CZ has said they won't be adding real fiat to binance.com---credit card buys and stablecoins is all. they'll have a network of satellite exchanges (like binance.us and binance.je) that offer fiat services instead.

it seems like they're trying to keep the status quo going on their main exchange (no KYC, VPNs allowed) for as long as possible. the nominal banning of americans should buy them some more time but i don't know how long it can last.


for trading that's true, but if you use them to deposit/withdraw fiat, i think you've always needed higher tier verification including ID and proof of residence. their verification page indicates that selfie may be required now too.

well sure they can. trump could even do it himself. in 1933, FDR banned private ownership of gold by executive order, and required people to sell it to the government at a fixed price. you don't think they could do that again?

of course it wouldn't kill bitcoin, but driving it into the black market would have a pretty big effect.

it depends what shape this correction takes. sometimes we dump hard first, then build a sideways base. if that happens, i think we'll be in the $10k - $11k range around that time.

other times we dump, then correct, then dump again. in that case, we could be back in the $9000s by the time september rolls around.

i guess it's of no consequence. if they aren't offering access to real money trading, they aren't breaking any laws. it's like offering play money poker games. AFAIK people in the USA can play with play money on pokerstars too, but are barred from real money games.