Cliche as it sounds:

+1

Phrased like that I completely agree.

I nominate you for the prestigious "most valuable bear of the year" award

And you were right back then (and are still right about it) that the possibility that BTC price goes into a year-long stagnation, or even decline, exists. Which is essentially what lucif alluded to as well. And earlier in this thread (IIRC) I agreed with you on that possibility having a non-zero chance, and that the bulls who react with serious aggressiveness to the mere mentioning of this possibility are in for some serious pain if that event ever unfolds.

If that event unfolds.

To me it's far from certain that this will be happening. Luc has his EW theory based arguments (and I find them pretty unconvincing on such a long time scale). What's your evidence? That we're still consolidating, possibly on an overall downward slope (although that part would already be contentious.), less than 2 months after the post-ATH-double top?

Here's what the long decline of 2011, and the long time between ATHs looked like on a log scale, plus the 30d EMA for getting a smoother view of how it unfolded:




And here's what our current post-ATH situation looks like, same time scale:





I don't know about what you see in that chart, but unless you're willing to draw grand conclusions about the future based on EW waves that span years, I see little evidence that we're on a trajectory to such a long decline.

I simply don't see enough of anything to make such a long shot.

I'm not ruling it out either, but I'm as sceptical about those who claim we'll see such a long bear market as I am about those who reject the possibility of that same bear market purely because it doesn't fit their greedy delusion of where BTC price should go.

Hey there. Please change your username immediately. You are very much not "too dumb for Bitcoin". You are exactly the right kind of dumb for it!

Here's my view of it: Intuitively, one might think that some particular news item x has a clear, maybe obvious effect on price. If you read for example the wall thread, it's pretty clear that's a rather popular idea there. In reality however, while news affects price, the question of *how* and *how much* some news item affects price is not set in stone, but rather dependent on how it is *interpreted*.

So the same news item, in two different market situations, could lead to drastically different results. Example: the SR takedown. Imagine asking on the wall thread a week or two before it happened how price would react if SR is being taken down by the FBI. I'm quite sure the intuitive answer would have been "terrible crash". And during the first few hours after the news, that was indeed the reaction. But then we discovered support, probably because of built up buying pressure, partly also because China had began to enter the game, and people started realizing that maybe it's not all that bad for BTC to cut its ties with the criminal market (not that it really did, but that what it looks like to the outside). And suddenly: huge rally.

So I can't speak for the others, since I'm taking a sort of middle position: news matter, but *how* they matter is heavily context dependent. And while I don't think *any* news can trigger any price action, often enough the market is in such a state that many different types of news can trigger the same price response.

Applied to today: I don't think, for example, that if the news of today would have been "US government outlaws Bitcoin" we would have seen the mild recovery we've seen. In that sense, it did in fact help that overstock made the announcement. But on a different day, the same announcement would have only caused a weak "so what?". So in that sense, it wasn't overstock that somehow caused the trend out of nowhere.

(Bit of a rambling post, sorry. Too lazy to rewrite it )

Good call, arepo. Let's see what the next days bring.

Ignore the people who think it all reduces to news. News matters, but not in the way they think it does.

Me too.

And I don't rule out 300 either. Just figured we're playing "pull unsubstantiated stuff out of your ass", so I played along

Haha, we don't talk about the same thing, I guess. I don't consider the low-900s to high-800s shift to be the short term drop I expected yet. Below 850, into the 700s maybe, is what I am (tentatively) expecting for the coming 24h to 48h. I can't trade the smaller swings or slippage eats my profits.

Blitz, you're a smart guy, stop with the '0% fee exchange volume is fake volume' canard. Discount the volume by some, sure. But it's not as if 0% trading is without any risk, and therefore done at a whim. It's just, well, cheaper, so volume is relatively higher and needs to be normalized to be compared to non-0% fee exchanges.

And I expect Janet Yellen's first action after assuming office to declare BTC the sole official currency of the US.

Don't like the looks of it, and I don't see that changing very soon. Ergo: (relatively small) re-arrangement of my position complete. Just to let you know, arepo :D

I somehow feel reminded to the recurring topic of empiricists vs. rationalists during my philosophy courses. I'm Kantian, and his solution applies to the false dichotomy "does news follow price, or vice versa?" just as well (not literally, but the idea behind it)

Interesting... seems you're actually more bullish than me. That's a first :D

(1) I see a significant discrepancy between gox and stamp, the former pulling up, the latter down. Have a harder time getting a picture from the other exchanges. (side note: yes, prices are highly correlated, but that doesn't mean a trend cannot form independently first on one exchange before it "infects" another)

(2) volume, money flow and order books, bid/ask don't look good to me. the latter trending slightly down, not strong enough to be sure, but not a positive sign either.

(3) I said it before, but I see stopping the latest drop above the 30d EMA is a very positive sign. I am looking at a (somewhat speculative) uptrend channel as well, and there's a chance we're in it still. That's the good news, IMO.

(4) With respect to where we are compared to the latest drop, however (on a narrower time frame), I see price pulling down more than up.

Apologies to the general audience if that sounds like useless analysis to you :P (and sloppy, as well... no graphs to back up what I say, huh?) I would argue that concluding there is no clear conclusion to be arrived at at the moment is a valid result as well. Although I'd be happy to be wrong and arepo to be right, by seeing an upward breakout soon.

I see. Guess we have pretty similar trading strategies and goals then.

So would you consider yourself a trader (aiming mainly for fiat profits) as opposed to a "trading investor"?

I'm just wondering because the thought had of course crossed my mind as well, to sit out the entire correction/consolidation phase in fiat, but to me it seems nearly impossible to do so without taking a hit to your total BTC holding.

I mean, say you would have optimally sold at ~1200. How long to wait til you're convinced the correction is over? 1000? 1100? Anything later than that, and your total BTC position is reduced. Which is okay if you're agnostic about BTC's long-term price target, but if you assume that in the long run BTC will worth much more, it all becomes a game of what, I think, Rampion called "land grab".

So I don't really feel comfortable sitting it out entirely, only during the most obvious and violent downward movements do I turn (more or less) full fiat.

May I suggest HubrisCoin

dnaleor, come on man, work with me here

I already agreed: the previous "Christmas trend" is broken. What I don't agree with is your pulled-out-of-nowhere claim that we'll enter a bear market for several weeks as a result. That part requires a bit more evidence, no?

Very good... You noticed that breakthrough as well But what to make of it, huh? We're already above again, with exactly one 6h candle in betweedn opening and closing below. By my count, that means there's a good chance we'll revisit this level again in the next days, so: low 900s very well possible.

But apart from that? I've said before, I consider the most likely end of the post-ATH decline/correction/bear market to be in late January/early February, but I also said I can be convinced otherwise if a clear reversal reveals itself. It's still a possibility in my opinion, depending on how we recover from yesterday's drop.

Don't know about you, but I'm not tempted to make a major adjustment to my position yet. Then again, as I said before, there are different trading styles... frequently, with smaller amounts vs. seldom, with larger amounts. I do the latter, almost exclusively. Waiting until I'm sure of a major swing, then put in one or two larger orders -- worked extremely well for me this December.

Me too (well, I live here). (Amsterdam?)

Anyway, here's a cute little thread from r/europe of today. I don't think the EU is perfect, but still a far cry from EUSSR, in my opinion.

let me guess. you're from the UK?

Eh, Blitz is alright in my book. "Occasionally insightful, mostly mild troll" would be my characterization of him (or her). Plus, he's a mod, and hell have I seen mods letting their "power" get to their heads, and it seems he doesn't do that. Good guy, good avatar, AAA+++ would do business again.