Today, December 15, 2018, the cryptocurrency market capitalization slumped down to $100 billion.
The market that once held $840 in capitalization yet only has a $100 billion due to the market correction.
What y'all guys thinking? are we bottomed yet? or we still have some few more miles to go? Roll Eyes I don't really see total market cap of the entire crypto market being a useful indicator of what we are right now with bitcoin. But anyways, no, I don't think that $3k is the bottom. There is every chance that prices will continue to dip before finally recovering. There is still a lot of bearish sentiment within the market that doesn't seem to be gone any time soon, and there is still quite some volatility which is not characteristic of bottoming markets. Again, I'd say that we're fairly close at the moment to where the true bottom is, given that this bear market has essentially gone on for the entire year. However, I would not expect there to be a sentiment shift within the market until at least late 2019, or 2020. Thus, a bullish trend reversal doesn't seem very likely any time soon. We could be heading to test the $3k support at any time, still. |
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I am not rushing to buy bitcoin, i am not afraid to miss the rally simply because of the nature of the market cycles.  It is quite impossible to predict the bottom or the top of any trend, but one thing for sure that these cycles apply to every single market.  looking at BTC chart from the drop in late 2013-2014 the market lost volatility and remained in a sort of "stand-by" mode for roughly a whole year (300 days). before breaking out of the massive triangle. there is a very good chance the period of accumulation and anger-depression for this bear trend to be shorter or longer than the previews one, but one thing for sure is that it has too take some good amount of time which in my opinion a few months at least. according to the historical data the rally should start around OCT 2019. there is no way the rally will start over night and recover all these dips instantly, no market does this. that is why I do not try to catch the falling knife, and FOMOing over every single green candle like many others do. I see a lot of people start jumping in and calling for " moon is here, buy now before it's too late". I understand that people are afraid to miss the train, thinking the price can move up real fast similar to last year crazy bull run, what they don't know is that the real rally only starts after breaking out of the current ATH. if you look at the chart, you can see the price rose up slow and steady from the low of 2014 to the previews ATH formed on Dec 2013 around ( 1170 $). the moment it broke out of the ATH , it starting going in almost an angle of 90 degree with nearly no correction all the way to almost 20k. of course it much better to enter some where close to the bottom, but the bottom can be any where, and as long as the market is taking massive dips like this, then it's unlikely to be the bottom. I am almost certain that the price will fall even further from here, but indeed it will always correct, for all i know price could go back up all the way to 5.5k to re-test it but that will only be the fuel for a further dip and not the begging of a rally. unless you are buying for the very long term ( years ) then i rather wait for a better signal to buy. so from now to the accumulation stage, we could see many bull traps, 10-20% up , people start jumping on the MOON boat only to end up sinking. and of course, this is not a financial advice, I am only sharing my thoughts. feel free you share yours. First of all, you are absolutely correct in terms of stating that bitcoin prices tend to move in cycles. Each cycle to date seems like it is somewhere between 3-4 years. I also expect prices to potentially dip by a bit more, and move sideways due to the fact that I think that we're close to the capitulation phase of the market cycle. There is virtually no chance for recovery to happen this year or even first half of next year in my opinion, if you look back towards the 2014-15 bear market which was quite similar (not going to be 100% accurate, of course). Honestly, I wouldn't bother trying to find the exact bottom if you are a long term investor. Not only is this very improbable to do, you could miss out on a buying opportunity when you keep waiting on lower prices. In my opinion, trying to minimise your average cost per BTC is key, and right now, prices are low enough for investors to start doing so. |
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I'm not sure whether or not this surge was a result of the bull market of 2017. If it was, then I wouldn't be surprised, as there were still a lot of people who went into the market speculatively at the start of the year with the presumption that the bull market would keep going.
However, even though prices are going down, I don't think that there is necessarily a decrease in adoption, or interest in bitcoin at all.
Quite the opposite, we see big institutions like Goldman Sachs all express their interest in potentially launching bitcoin trading products, or services. Even though this isn't necessarily actual adoption in the form of merchant usage, it would still be a spark for demand in the next bull market from a speculative point of view. That's a reason why I'm not concerned about this drop at all.
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I guess people do look at certain cryptos, that are in fact completely centralised and probably no different or perhaps even worse than holding fiat currency, and confuse them with bitcoin, which is probably the most decentralised and most practical cryptocurrency at this stage.
A lot of these cryptos, including state issued ones, don't offer the 'traits of money' that are listed here for bitcoin at all. If the supply or issuance of a token is centralised, or a single party holds ultimate control over a certain project, it's really no good as currency at all.
It should be quite obvious to any even marginally experienced bitcoin user to realise the benefits of bitcoin, at this stage, compared to fiat currencies though. Its irreversibility, its decentralisation, and the fact that it exists natively to the virtual world all mean that it is a great form of money, or at least a very convenient long term store of value.
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It could be argued that gold is priced somewhat arbitrarily, based on market demand as a store of value -- exactly like BTC. However gold is a physical product and has real-world uses as an element.
With all that taken into account, will the market drive them to general parity? Like the Euro/Dollar?
Just because that gold may perform similar monetary functions when compared to bitcoin, at least from a store of value standpoint, doesn't mean that their values or market caps should necessarily be on par with each other. That makes no sense. It's like saying that the US Dollar should be on par with the Euro, just because they are both fiat currencies. You need to take into consideration the fact that value is solely determined by supply and demand, and that right now, demand for gold as a form of investment vehicle and safe haven asset due to its decentralised supply, and people's trust in its historical inflation hedging properties is still a lot higher on a macro level worldwide, leading to its market cap being much higher than BTC. However, I could see bitcoin taking a large share of the gold market cap in the future due to the fact that it is just so much more portable, and divisible, while retaining the same monetary integrity and decentralisation, which is what makes gold such a good long term hedge against fiat depreciation. |
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I did some research on them.
- There are some reviews, youtube videos, that as 1Referee said would indicate that they are more than just an obvious scam at first site. They seem to actually have products, which apparently they manufacture themselves. Website's design doesn't look too suspicious either.
- However, there is very limited information available in regards to the actual physical location of the company, where it is incorporated, what its business number is, etc. Thus, there is still a risk of buying from them imo.
If they do accept Paypal goods and services, and you are able to deal with the risk of not getting your goods delivered (since Paypal is still not foolproof), then go ahead and place an order. Although, the promotion that you referenced seems to already have gone.
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Regardless of the item that you buy, or the person that you deal with, as long as the deal is above $30, it's probably worth at least using some form of escrow protection, even if it's a free service. For low amounts, using Bitify would be better than nothing, even. $300 is definitely a sufficient enough amount to be using escrow.
Ranks of bitcointalk members are rarely a very good indicator of their trust level. That's just the hard truth on this forum. Unless there is clear indications that the user has been sent BTC first for goods before, always assume the worst. Accounts can be bought and sold, without you knowing at all.
Seems like you did learn your lesson, and obviously do not expect anything back at this point as it is extremely hard to track down anyone from their forum profiles alone. Hopefully you did learn a lesson though, and it's not just buying miners - it's buying anything off anyone.
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Economists and financial experts have alluded to the fact that fiat currency have been encumbered by several challenges.
Some of which include the costs of printing and allocation.....
the cost of moving it from place to place ( security)
the cost associated with storing (saving)
the cost associated with inherent loss of value due to inflationary pressures and so on.
If bitcoin holds the answer to some or all these issues, then the implication is that the prospects of the bitcoin is grater than any of us can imagine.
None of these are really problems that bitcoin solve, because these are only problems that commercial banks and central banks are concerned with. The main problem that bitcoin solves in my opinion is centralisation of financial services, and the money supply. Since bitcoin is decentralised, it means that no central entity will ever be able to abuse their power to issue currency, nor will banks be able to potentially block any transactions and/or fail in a financial crisis due to the fact that the entire economy operates under fractional reserve. And as you mentioned, bitcoin is a hedge against inflation. It's disinflationary as opposed to fiat being inflationary, which makes it in my opinion a much better store of value in the long term. But the problems like the cost of printing money, and the cost of storing money, etc. can be solved by cashlessness alone. The central bank settling transactions electronically (which they already do) solves these issues. Bitcoin is a subcategory under cashless payments, and there is a clear distinction to be made. |
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It could be because of the oligopoly of the e-payments sector, with basically WeChat Pay and Alipay dominating the market.
As a result, the central bank may feel an increasing lack of control over the transactions that are happening within these platforms, which could be the reason why this statement was released in the first place. But of course, other reasons such as the lack of education for rural areas and elderlies to use the technologies that are crucial to cashless payments are also valid.
I do feel like that China eventually will move completely cashless, and will be one of the first countries to do so. But the central bank will definitely assert more control and regulation over time, potentially through their own blockchain based currency.
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Exactly as buwaytress said, it simply makes no senes for the government not to try to regulate bitcoin instead of attempting to restrict access to using it altogether. Not only is an outright ban completely unnecessary, and impossible to enforce, they are also missing out on potential tax revenue that could be generated from a regulated environment.
Of course, this is just a report and it's unclear what the ministers in India will do with it. But at this point, I don't think it matters that much because of the abundance of resources outside of regulated exchanges that exist in India, including stablecoins etc. that can be used to circumvent bans from the central bank.
Even if the ruling stayed with banning BTC, instead of regulating it, there should still be quite a lot of adopters in India nonetheless. And we could see existing crypto businesses move overseas, as did other exchanges in China.
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Are you able to cancel the withdrawal? If so I would suggest you do so and convert the USDT to another stablecoin or bitcoin and withdraw that.
Thank you for your answer.. Actually we have an arbitrage software and. Our software catch good signals between hitbtc and other exchange website. So We need to use USDT/BTC trade and withdrawal money from Hitbtc with USDT This is why arbitrage rarely works across multiple crypto exchanges. There are simply too many occasions where wallets are in maintenance mode, deposits/withdrawals are disabled etc. to consistently make profits. If you can, you should probably try to incorporate that into your arbitrage analysis. But HitBTC itself is not really a very trustworthy exchange in the first place, due to the large amount of complaints that was present for really the last year or so. In this case your only choice is wait till they fix the problem. I wouldn't recommend using them, unless you're willing to take up the risk of having to go through potentially draconian KYC/AML measures when withdrawing funds, and deal with the risk of your account being suspended. |
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If there were to be a bull market within this current decade, I'd say it would happen in 2020.
Firstly, the halving would be able to provide a reason for traders to be bullish, as the distribution of coins tighten. We've also historically seen bullish sentiment emerge from bear market around the time of halvings.
It wouldn't be surprising to me if people started to FOMO buy because of the halving, and the institutional investors that have started to pile in, and as a result, a bubble emerges. Again, it's not always a wise decision to hold bitcoin. When prices rise too much in the short term without any fundamentals (like institutional investors, or actual adoption surge), it's probably a bubble, and it makes sense to cash out for the short term and buy in at a lower price.
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Why crypto currency have so much value? Even its statless and we cannot get any physical commodity or asset ?
What makes you think that an asset needs to have a country backing it for it to be considered valuable? Also, there is absolutely no one who says that an asset needs to be physical in order to be valuable. There are plenty of funds in the world that are in virtual fiat currencies, stocks, etc. Bitcoin's valuable not from a legal standpoint, but rather from the fact that people trust in its decentralisation, and the fact that the supply can't be tampered with by any central entity. The fact that you can transact with it on a global scale without middlemen is what makes it valuable, not because laws state that BTC is the national currency of a country. That's the distinction between bitcoin and fiat currencies. |
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Inspired by two equally bold and opposing calls in the Chessnut's 'Critical Level's' thread (85% and 20%), thought it would be interesting to see what anyone else has to say ... Poll closes in 23 days, unless target hit earlier  It's extremely unlikely given the circumstances that we are in now. The past bear market in bitcoin (2014) have saw prices go down around 80% before stability. I don't expect this bear market to be that different. Even though historical performance isn't necessarily always an indicator of what will happen, there is simply no reason for BTC to go down to 3 digits. Firstly, I still believe that there will be firm demand for bitcoin at the $3k level, which will have strong support. Secondly, institutional investors that are just entering the market during this period of bearishness will likely seize the buying opportunity if BTC does tumble down below $3k, as well individuals that are investing in BTC in the long term. There will simply be too much demand looking at it on a macro scale, if prices do fall to $2-3k, which will stop it from going down further. While 3 digits is possible, I think that would take some real failures in the network, or several prominent countries imposing bans on BTC at the same time to make it happen. |
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Those of you trading on localbitcoins.com Be careful! I just received the email below, with an almost legit looking URL. Note the .us within the URL is the only difference from the real thing. The email even contained reference to a real advertisement of mine. I'm in the habit of calling up web pages to my accounts manually, and I already happened to be logged in at localbicoins. New message from LocalBitcoins support ticket #630194.
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This account has been flagged as high-risk after receiving a support ticket submitted by another user regarding the following ad:
ONLINE_SELL #[redacted]
Please review and reply to this ticket as soon as possible to help us further investigate this matter. Failure to access this ticket may result in the suspension and/or revocation of your account until contact is made.
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Best regards,
LocalBitcoins
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To access this ticket, visit:
https://localbitcoins.us.com/support/reply/630194/
For security and privacy reasons this ticket may not be accessible without proper authentication due to the sensitive information involved. Jesus, that's scary. I took a look at the site and it's pretty much just a perfectly mirrored version of LBC's login page. Do you have any idea how they were able to get ahold of your email address, and also your username on Localbitcoins? If they just obtained one of these things it makes sense, but I can't fathom how they got their hands on both and somehow linked them together to send this email. Anyways, this is the reason why 2FA is necessary. It makes it harder for phishers to be able to gain access to your account even if they somehow get ahold your username and password. But in general, make sure that the link you click on any of your emails is legit before you enter any details on there. Also, it might be possible to report them to us.com, since they're a subdomain of that site, essentially. They may be able to take their site down entirely (assuming that they are responsive). |
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With the current economy, the fears about the Brexit, Italy, the Sino-American problems and the general pessimism among investors; It looks like Gold is coming back the past months. At the same time, countries like the EU, Japan & China are reducing their investments in the economy,
(it should also reduce demand for the USD?)
Even the Central banks are buying more Gold (+13% from the previous year). Economists predict a dark year for 2019 and it seems a lot of large funds are now buying Gold massively. Especially from Asia and Soviets.
In periods of financial instability, gold has always outperformed the other sectors. This could be the reason why we saw some more activity within the gold market this year, compared to the last few years. Obviously, there is pretty much no chance that gold will ever be able to return to being a currency like it once was, but it's still a global standard of store of value. If there was to be a recession in the economy, which is possible soon given the span of time that we have went without one now, we could see a resurgence in gold prices for sure. But one interesting thing to see is whether or not institutions would put aside some of their funds into BTC as an alternative store of value to gold, which is imo probably more attractive as a longer term investment than precious metals, given that the value of precious metals is likely not to have large gains even in its bull markets given its maturity as an asset class. I guess volatility is an issue, but risk seeking institutions that are able to hold BTC for the long run could see this as a legitimate viable alternative investment vehicle that is independent from the fiat economy in times of crisis. |
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Mark that date because this is the final extension. As mentioned in the article, on February 27, 2019 the SEC will need to make a decision if they approve or reject VanEck's proposal. What a terrible time to put bitcoin in a period of uncertainty.
What are your predictions, will the ETF be approved or rejected? I know my answer, but I reckon you would not like it. If the SEC really wanted to approve it, it would have been approved already. I honestly think that there is a relatively low chance that any bitcoin related ETFs would be able to be approved in the near future. There is a slight chance, but it's slim to none. Otherwise the SEC would not have rejected all the previous applications and kept postponing their decisions. I'll pretty much continue to accumulate during this bear market without regard for this news, because I don't think that even if ETFs do get approved, there will be any longer term impacts that is able to be established into the market. People say that they are buying in anticipation of an approval, but I'm not expecting that. Even if it does get approved, all there will be is a short term spike in prices due to the hype generated. There is nothing more than that - ETFs do not help actual bitcoin users that conduct on-chain transactions one single bit. |
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The comparison to gold bugs definitely does make sense.
As The Pharmacist mentioned, these are the type of people that tell you to buy gold no matter what, regardless of what market cycle the current precious metals market is in. For example, Peter Schiff, etc. do this because they sell gold and benefit personally from anyone that buys their story and keeps on buying.
Tim Draper's comments are kind of like the bitcoin equivalent of these gold bugs - buy no matter what. That's just wrong and you will most likely end up with a high entry price which will be hard to break even on without holding your position for extended amounts of time, and even then it's not guaranteed. Even though right now is a good time to dollar cost average and buy up due to the overwhelming bear sentiments, it doesn't mean it'll always be a good idea to enter the market.
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Just like they are holding big amounts of gold and displaying amounts that I think may be approximate amounts:  Could we see this in the future? I think it's a matter of time. If a country starts accumulating a lot, at some point other countries will not be able to keep ignoring it, and I believe you can't ignore Bitcoin just like you couldn't ignore powder, you must be in. Most likely they hold some already but aren't disclosing it. It's up to the central bank of each country to decide this. But I don't think we're far from seeing bitcoin in central bank reserves. After all, bitcoin is already a universally recognised form of payment, and financial instrument. It is also way more portable than gold, which obviously poses significant advantages for central banks who want to keep BTC in their reserves to implement monetary policy, or to maintain their exchange rates. Bitcoin can definitely replace gold as a store of value on central bank's balance sheets, given more adoption and market maturity, and less short term price fluctuations. I think that countries such as Japan that are already quite advanced in terms of crypto acceptance and regulation will seriously look into this. Financially unstable countries that are looking to launch their national cryptos like Venezuela could hold bitcoin to maintain their own crypto's value as well. With the flood of institutional investors, it's only a matter of time to me. |
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The prediction about the bottom isn't really far fetched. $2.5k could be possible. The $333k price prediction for this time in 2 years probably is.
But for both of these predictions, I simply don't see any proof or analysis to back this up sufficiently. Really seems like that he just pulled the arbitrary figure of $333,333 out of the hat, without actual analysis.
I certainly do not expect the bull market, if it does come in 2020-2021 due to the halving, to be as large in magnitude as the previous one. As prices climb, percentage growth will decline in each bull market imo because there is only a finite amount of fiat in the world. Even a 6 figure bitcoin doesn't seem likely at the moment.
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