What is this? Sideways for ants?

Each time there is even a small dip the media finds the "reason" for that. The last example is the shutting down of the internet in Kazahstan   In some isolated cases there is some truth, but in 99%+ these "reasons" are completely irrelevant. The media just need need headlines to grab the attention of the readers.

Bears: "Now is our chance to breach 40K."

40K:

Since the poll is still broken, I suggest a mini poll: What will be the top price in the next week. I say 50 750$. Reasons: quite often after a 30%+ dip from the ATH follows a 25% increase from the bottom. I believe 40 600$ was the bottom, hence the number. If this is not the bottom, better prepare your wallets for the brief opportunity to buy below 40K.

Ignoring the %'s which excite mostly the traders, why any hodler would panic sell 1BTC for nearly 30K less than 2 months before? Only n00bs with less than a year experience can do such nonsense. Speaking of n00bs, where are all those new twitter laser eyes profile pics now? Only the most hardened hodlers can keep the laser focus no matter what happens. And this applies not only for 100K, but for any price actually.

Some declared in May 2021 that because the crash was 55% (much more than the usual 40% crashes during the bull years) that the bull run had ended. I replied that this is like to tell in the middle of the Summer that because the temps dropped 15C more that usual, the Summer is over. I was right and we saw another ATH later in the year. In the same way, just bacause it happened in the previous halving cycles, it is not clear yet whether we are entering a bear year. May be the chances are ~50% for that but not much more. It can happen that 2022 will be like 2017, starting with a 40% crash, and ending with some insane ATH's above 300K.

The truth is we are in uncharted teritories with no exponential top and probably no 2-3 years bear market with a 85% bottom. I have the gut feeling that this is the bottom and we will get above 80K after 3-4 months. The poll is still broken, but I'm not ready with my prediction of the 2022 top price, anyway. 160K, 330K... Perhaps? Or we've already seen the top price, God forbid  

Good morning WO! I've just initiated a new fiat wire to the exchange. I'm calling the bottom/capitulation for this 2 month sell-off. 

Someone talked a few pages back about going to 20K and now 10K. This escalated quickly indeed  Meanwhile we are still 50% above the year low, so no big harm is done. The problem bears have is that hundreds of millions people and institutions are dreaming of cheap bitcoins, so any bigger dip is quickly bought. Surely, we can go lower, I don't argue about that. There are always enough fools around there to sell at any price. I've just watched an episode of Pawn Stars, where some moron went to Rick. The dialogue went like this:
-Rick: How much do you want for that?
-100K.
-Rick: I give you 3K.
-3.2K?
-Rick: Deal!

This sums up the behaviour of both the spot  and the derivate traders. I'm sure their loss is tremendous, but they continue to believe doing the same thing over and over again will give different result at the end. This is just the definition of stupidity.

I wouldn't rule out one more long squeeze before resuming the bull run. The naked longs are increasing by each hour and asking to be liquidated. They might get lucky this time, but it will be a drop in the sea after so many long squeezes this year. They deserve their fate in the hell of eternal losses, together with the daily trend followers. I wonder if any of those morons are reading this thread. If so, I would like to thank them because I always BTFD! It is funny how a single whale can make them sell with a 50% discount. Can you go to a car shop for example and say: hey morons, I will buy this lambo for half  the price. They will laugh at you. But If a whale silently moves 10K+ bitcoins, the traders will immediately start panic selling. Not to mention if the whale is dumping 4-5K bitcoins to his own bids, then he will have weeks in disposal to buy with a 40%+ discount. Anyway, this whole Asia sell-off won't last forever, Laura!   It is time for accumulating more satoshis. My next big fiat chunk is on the way to the exchange. This will be the perfect gift for Christmas.  

This is my favorite chart   The bad news is that we didn't reach the upper line this year. The good news is that we are way ahead of the bottom line for Dec 2021. And the latter is more important, since it shows the potential for future growth in the next 3-4 years. The bottom line is looking perfectly doable. At some point this extrapolation won't work of course, but the mass adoption levels curretnly have plenty of room to increase. Only then the chart will deviate from that channel for a longer period, probably. The period 2015-2016  little below the line didn't break the model. So, even if in the next 2 years the chart stays below the lower 2x line, it definetely has the potential to catch up. This means 400K is not only doable, but quite probable in the next 4-6 years.  It looks that the first big deviation for more than 2 years can occur above 500K at the earliest. IMO most probaly it will occur above 1 mil.

Testing the 47K support again. It seems that some entity is stubbornly selling despite the lack of bitcoin inflows to the spot exchanges. With each day, fewer and fewer people are caught by the fear of losing fiat money, i.e being weak hands. More and more people and institutions are realizing the power of hodling, including the miners. So, unlike 2018, any significant dip in the price is short lived and bought by people with Michael Saylor's understanding and motivation. It is true that we didn't see an exponential FOMO run this year, but still we are 14x from the local bottom in March 2019 and 7x from the median price around which Bitcoin was traded in 2018-2020. And this should make us happy, not sad. I don't know what the price will be tomorrow, next month or a year. But I know that better times are coming with more retail, institutional, governments etc. adoption. And this will affect the price in a positive way, for sure.  

Yesterday's sell-off wasn't related to the derivate markets, nor to a rush of hodlers to sell in fear of a bear market. So, this probably means that OTC desks are the culprit and possibly highly involved in the last month selling pressure. Whether it is one rotten whale or a bunch of hedge companies looking for some profit at the end of the year is irrelevant. These were just some ill timed big sales in a bull market. Now there is no reason for this to continue much longer - the supply of coins on exchanges continues to decline (unlike 2017), open interest and high leverage longs are no more, no FUD, ban, etc. news are around.

Historically, each bigger sell-off continues maximum one month after the local top, so we must be close to a reversal now. Perhaps the only thing in favour of the bears is the fear that 69K was the top of the cycle and it will be followed by a 85% correction. And probably this will lead to more high leverage shorts than before and less high leverage longs. In that case, we definitely will see at least one big short squeeze in 2022. As seasoned hodlers we know that if 95% of the traders expect a certain movement, in reality the opposite happens. It is too early to tell but may be the time has arrived when we see no more 2-3 year bear markets. Instead, a new pattern may be formed: 2 months of some increase, followed by 1-2 months of a correction, cleansing the weak hands, and resuming the upward movement.

I am opening a 100x 1x leverage long position for €5k 

Some glassnode observations:

--------
Whenever price creates new highs, there are invariably traders who buy the top. These new investors are the first group tested by the next period of uncertainty, and nothing spells uncertainty like a flash sell-off in futures.

With cascading liquidations come spenders in loss, and last week's event set a recent high for Realized Losses on-chain. The sum of coins spent in loss for December 4 totalled $3 billion. Coming into Saturday, previous high marks were set on May 19 and June 25, with losses of $4.5B and $3.8B respectively.

So if older coins are not being spent in notable size, and exchanges are not seeing elevated activity, then where are spent coins coming from?

They're coming from Short Term Holders— investors who bought in the past few months, most of whom are spending at a loss.

Through our observations of the data, last week's sell-off was driven by liquidations in the futures market, and the various on-chain cohorts that make up Bitcoin's supply remain largely unfazed. Those who are spending coins appear to be predominantly those who bought the top, and they are realizing losses and capitulating.

High levels of leverage followed by price volatility is a classic recipe for a correction, and capitulative moments like Bitcoin just experienced are unfortunately needed for markets to return to a healthy equilibrium. The key question we will seek to answer in the coming weeks, is whether market sentiment has taken a severe enough hit that the underlying conviction seen this week deteriorates, or does it hold on.
---------

https://insights.glassnode.com/week-onchain-week-49-2021/

The current price is soooo boring, that I decided to share some of my current thoughts. I know what Bitcoin means and what it will give to me and my family. I can describe it with one word: FREEDOM! Freedom not only from the salary slavery, but from all kinds of fears. And to live without a fear is something that nobody in this world can give it to me. No matter how rich I am, if my riches are obtained by the rules of the fiat system. I mean, I may have companies worth billions of $s and still live in a bungalow, because of taxes and other financial obligations. For these reasons and many more, my focus has become obtaining more Bitcoins, rather fiat savings in the bank.

Having said that, it requires a bit of spending related to escaping the salary slavery, buying a house, equipment and medical treatment. This is one of the bitter pills I had to swallow this year by selling part of my stash. The other bitter pill is that I wasn't aware in time to gather more coins. Of course, this is the case with most of us and I guess everyone finds a way to be content with the stash they have. I mean it always looks we are late, and so on. In reality, we are still early adopters. So, no matter what happens related to Bitcoin news, ups or downs, we should keep stacking those precious sats. This looks easy, but remember mindurst!

I am sad for this guy, he was so happy to acuire the 10th coin and a few days later blew it all because he appreciated more the fiat savings than Bitcoin. The danger for us, who know what Bitcoin means, is similar - to be tempted to sell at the "top" of the cycle and rebuy at the "bottom" of the bear market. This sounds so tempting, for example if we sold at 20K in Dec 2017 and rebought in 2018 at 3100, we would have had >6x more coins! And this thought was so depressing for me during the 3 year bear market. But there is nothing to be done about it. On the chart it looks so easy, but how many succeeded selling and rebuying with such a huge profit? The odds are much smaller than betting on a single number of a roulette in a casino. They are higher if we aim for a smaller profit like 10-20%, but does it look fine betting 100% of our stash for, say a 25% chance of winning? This is only a rough estimation.

When we calculate the odds, we should take into consideration not only the chances of going up or down, which are around 50% in a bull market, but also whether we would nail the top and the bottom. We may expect a 20% drop, and it may turn out to be only 15%, which means we never return our selling amount. Hence the chances of increasing the stash in this way are getting much smaller. So this hope should be buried toghether with the hope of profiting from shitcoins or building a time machine and buying back in time (which has a slightly better odds than the shitcoins). The only way is to continue buying with the new income, although it looks stupid to buy higher than I sold. But there is an important difference: I am using my future fiat income, not the profit from the sell of Bitcoins. So, as long as I live and have an income, I will pursue a bigger stash. That's the only financial greed which  is healthy in this world. Everything else is a mixture of slavery and fear. Not acceptable for me!

There is one major difference between Bitmex and Binance. Bitmex owners are well known scammers, who were often accused of foul play against their customers. I haven't read anything similar for Binance owners, which doesn't mean they are alright, of course. Surely there are all kinds of manupulations on most of the exchanges. But I think that the main force which is restraining the prices and causing sporadic dips and crashes is the irrational volume of long liquidations in Binance. I've been watching the liquidation data closely and each time there is a 2-3% dip there are 5-10x more long liquidations, compared to short liquidations during a 2-3% price increase. This shows that the shorters are more cautios this year, while the longers are quite reckless.

In general, what happens in derivate exchanges stays there. But Binance is an exception - it is simultaneously a derivate and a spot exchange. So what happens there has a real impact on the price. The volume above 40K bitcoins each day is beyond the power of a single whale. And the liquidation data confirms  that there are millions of longers losing ~100$. It is like a new Tortuga attracting all kind of wastrels and seekers of treasure. They refuse to invest and hope to get lucky, not caring about Bitcoin or the odds of winning. And if they claim here the odds are good, then they are surely applying proudhon's math and science  .

For me the problem is not the lack of a retail interest. The problem is that anytime the price increases, immediately it is pulled back by the bots of Binance traders. And the reason for this is that probably too many monkeys are fighting for one banana, i.e. too many are trying with a leverage from 10x to 100x to make some profit. Hence the increased number of long positions - since the first big crash in May, they tried to compensate by investing again at prices which were looking stable - around 59K. And because the bots of all exchanges are using Binance price, the role of short and long positions there has become crucial, like Bitmex in the past. The only difference is that Bitmex manipulators used Bitstamp and Kraken as low volume exchanges to bring down the price, while now Binance longers are selling on each miniscule price increase on Binance to get some profit. The effect is the same. They failed once again, losing all their investment. Before the crash on Binance there were 2.7 bil longs. After the crash only 1.5 bil survived.

The quiestion now is when the gravity of this always losing game will be overcome and the price starts to climb again. Hopefully the effect will be felt as early as the next week and it will continue until the n00bs take loans and open another 100x leveraged longs somewhere between 120K and 200K. It is funny how the new ATH's make everybody happy, but only the hodlers can realize profits. Definitely not the naiive wet-dreaming long gamblers aka nocoiners, who end up with red eyes and empty pockets... ALWAYS. I think proudhon is one of them, once having thousands of bitcoins, which were lost on stupid shorts and still waiting for the price to falls to 100$. Now, this is the definition of pathetic  

Honestly, I am gloating about these long leverage liquidations. Am I a bad person? May be... But these morons will never learn from their mistakes until they lose all their money. I am not sure about the exact numbers, coinglass shows much less, but they don't include CME, bakkt and others, which is rather strange. They show 1B liquidations, but on blockchainwhispers I see that only on Binance 1B longs were closed/liquidated. Since Binance is the main price maker, these longs have been a huge problem each time the price started moving up. Obviously, too many monkeys had been trying to squeeze some profit into the eye of a needle. And this is the second big long liquidation massacre this year with almost each day losing >100 mil. Man, this is worse than the chances in a Las Vegas casino! I just can't help gloating    And buying of course.  

This might be a bear trap. Then straight to 60K+.