The futures won't be going anywhere. By your logic we won't be reaching $20,000 again?

The bull run of last year 'killed' itself for all reasons a bubble in the regular market 'kills' itself. It was NOT bad news or whatever other nonsense. It was just a matter of buy the rumor and sell the news. If you also take into consideration the following[1] aspects, the correction was near guaranteed to happen. Whoever shorted Bitcoin at that point, you have done extremely well.

[1]
The price was extremely overbought and near a very important psychological level, being $20,000.
There is years and years of evidence (look up the charts) that the price ALWAYS goes down in January.
And perhaps that tax selling could be a thing as well. There is no direct evidence for that, but it would make sense if it happens.

Also, the MtGox thingy started to reach the headlines after the correction started.

That.

Mining is an extremely competitive industry where larger farms hope that the smaller farms give up just to make sure they will replace them with their own network power. In this case it might not have been a network power drop that was caused intentionally, but for miners there is no difference. The only thing miners care about is to fill up the gaps left by others to obtain a larger share of the network without affecting the difficulty much.

If miner X for whatever reason is not mining anymore, even if it's only a 30 minute outage, miner Y will replace their network share and benefit. If miner X is a smaller miner, then he may choose to wait for another hashrate drop opportunity instead of firing up his machines directly. It's brutal.

It's great seeing a massive shift happening towards Malta, but the thing that not many people think about is the centralization aspect of all these crypto related businesses.

What if other countries try to extort Malta in whatever shape or form just to get their toxic anti crypto incentives nursed? I strongly hope that it won't happen, but it's impossible to discard either. It's yet another potential single point of failure. I strongly hope that more countries will follow to compete with Malta, all to make sure that everything concerning this industry is well distrubuted. It's better for everyone, but people as always don't see a problem until it pops in their face.

Back in the early days it was greed. I didn't care about what crypto was, what the difference was between coins, I even found Bitcoin at that point a horrible coin because it was so insanely slow. This applies to all people we're dealing with in the modern crypto times, but these people remain like that, where back in the days people actually realized that altcoins were nothing more than rubbish and turned into hardcore Bitcoin believers.

I don't care about fiat gains anymore, and it doesn't even feel like a gain. The only thing I care about is shorting at the right moments to buy back. Ending up with more Bitcoins, that's what I consider to be a real gain. Converting Bitcoin to fiat feels like converting Gold to Brass, you don't do that shit unless you plan to buy back lower.

Technically it could affect crypto, but not in the most direct way. In case of a positive scenario for crypto, increasing oil prices will result in X industry to grow, and the growth in X industry positively affects Y industry, and the boost in that industry might result in the crypto industry to benefit. If there would be any correlation, then it would follow that route.

Everything makes sense till it doesn't, and in this case we have no concrete evidence that it affects or not effects crypto. In that regard it's better to remain neutral, but not let your main thought of there not being any correlation take you over. In the end, it's one economy and one pool of capital/wealth that all industries are 'fighting' for. Perhaps that with more past crypto history things will become more clear.

I'm quite certain that whales do actually care about the mining aspect, because less profitability for miners will lead to a drop in hash rate, and that isn't a positive sign in the end, especially if the mainstream media jumps on it as well. It's completely in their favor to not entirely mess with the market like they don't care. If they dump the market down too far, even if it's manipulation, they risk having a bigger whale buy the market up and directly outrule them, and they risk ruining their own game.

Whales rather play safe within a range they consider fair and doesn't work against the ecosystem too much. They are money hungry, but not stupid.

Retail traders on the other hand don't care about anything. If they have to sell far below miner cost they will do without hesitation. As long as they aren't dumping in large numbers, which they haven't been doing much this year, then there is nothing really to worry about. Let whales do their thing, their actions are calculated and smart.

People are retarded.

I remember back in the days when the 2010/2012 cyberpunks considered those who joined in 2013/2014 to be parasites, but nothing comes even close to what we think about those who joined last and this year. Instead of people joining to know more about Bitcoin, they join in an attempt to get rich quick with shitty altcoins and ICO's. The bubble they continue to inflate will at some point pop right in their silly face. It's only a matter of time.

I seriously wish there was a way to short the IQ of people here, because I would be a rich fuck by now.

Nothing in the world is stable, and it isn't meant to be stable. Bitcoin needs some level of volatility to attract liquidity, because being too stable as asset will eventually work against you. Not even your fiat currencies are stable. Regarding slow processing speed, LN will deal with that in the best possible manner.

People have different views on what a store of value should be, but the main thing is that we don't want our wealth to lose purchasing power in the long term. Fiat in that regard is a horrible store of value. It's nothing more than a convenient way to slowly burn through your purchasing power. People need to wake up for once. Even Gold hasn't been a good functioning store of value. If you bought Gold exactly 5 years ago, your net result would be a ~0.10% loss. If you add that fiat keeps losing purchasing power year on year, your loss is far greater than that.

People will at some point refrain from cashing out on-chain because there is no point in doing so anymore with enough adoption.

1 satoshi is 1000msat on LN, which will lend itself perfectly for extremely small tips, rewards, etc.

Everyone will be able to send $0.0000001 in Bitcoin basically for free or with less than that in fees. Why would you bother cashing out with that in mind? 

Altcoins will instantly be rendered near worthless as means of exchange. The only way for altcoins to differentiate themselves will be to offer something different as product.

Agreed. BitMEX wants you to bet on/against the market, regardless of the price.

Something that I noticed, which pretty much could confirm this, is the increased popularity of BitMEX.

All exchanges and crypto related services have lost a significant amount of traffic in the last months, which is normal since the hype is no longer present. Interesting counter fact is that BitMEX, as the only major crypto related entity, has been gaining an incredible amount of traffic, and that continuously. It's doing better than ever before.

This might indicate that people haven been looking for ways to short Bitcoin and the few other crypto currencies it has listed, all to increase their coin quantity on the way down.

There is definitely a massive amount of fud spreading happening, but we can't ignore the fact that USDT is not doing what it is supposed to do. So no, the idea behind it isn't working.

Plenty of exchanges don't respect the peg and they don't have to because there is nothing pegging USDT to the USD other than the promise that Tether (the company) will buy back your tokens for $1 per unit.

The main thing that made USDT lose its purpose of existance is that exchanges started listing USDT/USD pairs. Why on earth would you trade $1 versus $1? Bitfinex doesn't have a USDT/USD pair because they know it would ruin USDT, but they can't prevent other exchanges from doing it. Nothing prevents me from slowly buying up all USDT at an average of $0.95 and sell them back to Tether for $1.

On WEX you only need USDT 467,000 to dump the price down to $0.925. What if that dump triggers stop loss orders taking the price down to $0.75 or something? It's a tradable asset and not a stable coin. This whole Tether offers great utility theoretically, but not so much when it comes to real world use.

It's always the average joe that suffers the most from economical difficulties. They depend on their job, not only to pay their bills, but also to not let their massive debt grow larger. If businesses from small to big are trying to compensate loss in revenue, they'll get rid of the average joes the first.

Economical difficulties are mostly a guaranteed gain for Bitcoin and crypto in general. This will directly be the main reason for Bitcoin to push through $1,000,000 after whatever number of years. Bitcoin is a hedge against everything the regular economy stands for. The more the regular economy suffers the higher Bitcoin's price will be.

Maybe it's time for you to become less normal? Normal citizens don't come far in life. Think different.

Technically OP hasn't failed at all. Just because Bitcoin confidently went up over $6000 for now doesn't mean we won't be going back lower.

The thing is that without a bullish trigger the price won't be going up high enough to reverse the trend, and as long as we don't see a change in the trend, we can still go far lower than current levels. It might be a time consuming process, but it's not easy say anything of value in a market that's solely controlled by whales and bots right now. The retail influence consistently has become less of a thing with how depressed they are. They can only wait and hope for the price to go back up.

If you are so sure of $8000 then long Bitcoin with 5-10x leverage.

It's their insurance, to call it that. If the income from contract sales isn't sufficient anymore to cover people's payments, they can just make things up and claim that their internal costs have gone up significantly. People have to accept it even if they don't believe any of it.

If people think the current situation is bad, then wait and see how many of these cloud mining sites will rip you off once the block halving kicks in. Block halvings are like a gift from heaven for cloud mining sites. It provably allows them to pay you 50% less. I'm sure that a lot of the current cloud mining sites will even try to shut down their operations (if they even have hardware running) and legally walk out with your money. The house always wins.

It's definitely greed and very much short term thinking.

$6000 > $100,000 = $94,000 profit.
$5000 > $100,000 = $95,000 profit.

The difference isn't even worth waiting for.

Waiting most likely results in regret of not having bought sooner. In that case people tend to wait for the price to go back down, but what happens is that the price keeps going up even further. It's all unnecessary suffering that people put themselves through. Long term investments don't require you to be picky; the only thing you have to do is buy and secure your coins offline.

No worries man, we are here to learn and to help each other forward. Stay active.

That all depends on the sentiment and momentum of the market. If the market hints at a major increase, they'll gladly pay market price. Last year was the perfect example of that. Currently there is nothing people can hold on to; it's either we're going up or down, there is no such a thing as the price is high or low. If people are only looking to scoop up some short term profits, buying now is a pure gamble.

Even if we fall back to $5000 it is still not clear whether or not it's a good short term bet. Just because the price has gone down a lot doesn't mean it's cheap now. Long term speaking every current price is cheap, not so much for flip flop traders looking to squeeze out every possible penny.

The problem with these buy recommendations is that they will be altered as soon as the price falls well below their targets. We have seen that happen numerous times already. First $10,000 was a good price, then $9000, then $8000, etc. No one knows what the market is up to; everyone saying buy at this or that price is just as knowledged as you and me. People should buy when they feel it's time. If it's $6000 then fine. If $8000 then fine too. It all depends on your targets.

Bitcoin is constantly being adopted by merchants and incorporated in so many ways on business level. LN main-net adoption keeps increasing. More capital is entering through OTC trades. How much more good news do you need in order to realize that good news is no price driver?

Bitcoin's weakest point is its thin and easy to manipulate exchange market. OTC trading volume makes the volumes exchanges are pushing look like a joke, but yet the exchanges are the most important factor when it comes to deciding what the exchange rate is. If the money entering through OTC markets was pumped directly in Bitcoin through exchanges, we would be well over $50,000 right now, and maybe that figure is even conservative.

The trust in exchanges gets lower and lower, ridiculous KYC/AML policies, there has never been any serious level liquidity, etc; these are the main reasons why the OTC market has exploded. Even miners aren't selling their coins on exchanges anymore. Most of it gets sold privately.

I actually like fear in the market. Shorting at the right moment makes me the best profits, which is that I can buy back Bitcoin at far lower levels. An increasing price is meaningless to me since I don't care about fiat value. I just want to see my Bitcoin quantity keep swelling throughout the years, and these corrections are the best possible outcome to accomplish that.

Smart retail traders are accumulating around current levels, where I think that the more professional bobos will prefer to wait for their chart to lick their ass and make them comfortable to start buying. As long as you average your buys on the way down you'll be doing well. It requires some patience, but patience in this market pays off.

While holders do significantly contribute to a market, they can't do anything when it comes to whales having too many coins to play with. Even if people are holding 98% of all coins offline, the 2% that keeps circulating is enough for whales to terrorize the market.

We need people to buy up the coins whales are playing with right now, and as long as that isn't happening, they will keep manipulating this market. The less coins they have, the more they are forced to use their capital to buy the market back up in order to convince people to sell again. Almost no one is selling right now because it's pointless at current levels. It's a game that's being played with people here.

I find it horrible for the people suffering from this and I wish them nothing but the best, but it actually feels good knowing that it will only help Bitcoin become more of a powerful tool.

Bitcoin is actually nothing more than a reflection of how bad this system functions. People keep calling Bitcoin a bubble because of how it keeps growing, but they fail to understand that Bitcoin growing, especially in the long term, means that the current system is imploding. If Bitcoin's market cap at some point surpasses Gold, then the system is the only one to blame. If the world was a nice place and everyone had equal rights and financial freedom, Bitcoin would be near useless.

If governments want to combat Bitcoin effectively, they should try to actually force through improvements and make people suffer less from their incompetence. Anti regulations won't do it.