How exactly do we know the price is nearing the bottom? And what bottom are you exactly referring to?

Technically, the market has broken out of its comfort zone several times already, and based on that I from now refrain from calling bottoms. Yesterday we've reached the lowest point since last year November, and this isn't something easily to discard. What happened in the last months is that breaking bottoms results in an almost guaranteed test of the bottom below it, and we might be up for some more.

I do however agree that accumulation is the best option right now. I managed to scoop up some $5900'ish coins yesterday and I'm ready for more if so.

Technically, you don't know beforehand if the ad you are about to click on refers to a site that doesn't contain crap that directly infects your computer or whatever other device. You'll only find out if it's safe or not after you clicked on it. It's literally Russian roulette; you'll either regret it or not. Google doesn't care about what you do with your ad space, they just want you to pay. If later turns out you are abusing their ad space they simply banish you.

Google knows that there is heavy abuse going on, but they don't care. If they were selective and strict about who they sell their ad space to, they likely wouldn't be able to sell 50% of what they today manage to sell. Their logic is that abuse can be dealt with later on, and it works for them. No one here should expect Google to protect you.

Investors and even noobs have been pretty calm throughout the last months. The decline we're witnessing is the result of bots trying to combat each other. The retail influence on the market in the last months has been close to zero.

If you don't have to worry about the unstable retailers with their green and panic, this market actually has become similar to the stock market, but then where everything moves way faster. In other words, these are great times for TA nerds looking to strike some profits. Just look at how calm the market is when it isn't forced to move in a certain direction, the market is empty. Noobs aren't selling and aren't buying, they just hold their bags.

There is only one way for BitMex to outclass whales, which is to have BitMex bust them out of their positions by manipulating the market themselves. You can't win from whales if they have the ability to move the price to any level. BitMex has no other option than to play faul game here. They either eat, or get eaten. I'm certain they prefer to eat.

BitMex is like a casino, but one where luck can be replaced with near perfect winning odds if you're a market mover. No way they could ever last this long if they didn't cheat. It's a market lacking severe regulations, and it's near impossible to prove for regulators that BitMex is busting people out of their positions. With CME there at least are strict regulations involved and the SEC is constantly watching, manipulators wouldn't dare to pull something off.

There is no reason to ever leave or take a break. If people do end up leaving then they simply shouldn't have invested in this market to begin with.

People getting annoyed are solely here for the profits, while the rest is just using Bitcoin as they have always been doing. Spending Bitcoin for example isn't more expensive now the price has gone down, since you can just use the same price to buy your coins back with fiat. People make it unnecessarily difficult for themselves.

People should understand that there is a difference between the market that's fluctuating and Bitcoin itself. The market might look bad, but Bitcoin itself is still growing. Even the difficulty didn't flinch.

Again, the less you expect from the short term market, the less disappointment you have to endure. Expectations should be 0 (zero) right now.

This year's bottoms are meaningless apparently, and it doesn't seem to be a false breakout at all.

Right now we are on our way to last year's bottom that hovers around $5500 on average. If even last year's bottoms turn out to be meaningless, then no one will be able to point out what the bottom is. We can only wait and see what will happen. It will be an interesting time though, we don't often get to experience 2-way (down is reverse bull run) bull runs, where I am sure that there are people making insane amounts of money right now.

The are so many secondary markets available that we can utilize nowadays, that every up or down direction is worth money.

@davis196 & DooMAD

The split between Bitcoin and altcoin pairs will likely never happen, that I agree on. It was more a fantasy that I play around with in my mind; the expression came out too direct.

People keep hating on Warren Buffett for his trash talk, but everything he states perfectly applies to altcoins and their market. If he wouldn't just point at Bitcoin I would agree with everything that he said. The bubble is real, the pop will be real too, and very ugly. The only thing that prevented the bubble from popping thus far is that altcoins are licking Bitcoin's arse too much. Once that no longer happens and altcoins in whatever shape or form start moving individually, we'll see their real value.

It's optional, it's not forced upon you. If you think it's not smart to ditch fiat then you simply don't.

To add; no one will just blindly accept getting a chunk of his wage paid in Bitcoin. Those that go for this option know what they do and know what risks they expose themselves to, which is why they only stick to a lower percentage. These people don't have any direct use for that lower percentage and accept that the fluctuations might push the price lower.

The only situation where it's not optional is when you work for services generating revenue solely in crypto, but still, you're not forced to work for any of them.

Investors, and especially those without any prior experience, are more likely to wait for the market to recover a bit before they start pulling the trigger. It's near impossible to convince them to buy into a market that keeps going lower, while in reality these market circumstances offer the best possible entry points.

If we see a market that has gone up significantly already, like what happened last year, we sell and wait for the price to come down again. Newbies however see bull runs as a healthy sign and blindly invest without knowing what risks they expose themselves to. Noobs always complain about the price to go up when they sell, and go down when they buy; they just need to figure out why that happens and that they should do the exact opposite.

Obviously not. Why would governments take one cut of your pie when they can take it all?

Exchanges are just one single aspect of a market/industry that is far larger and will continue to grow larger. Everything related to crypto and the blockchain right now is similar to how it was back in the very early internet days. Barely any use but still plenty of speculation, where after a while actual useful tech and purposes started to pop up that managed to stay up even today.

With every tech and purpose popping up there are plenty of different uses that governments are eager to impose tax on. It should be clear by now that governments are tax hungry sluts. Nothing will change for the better in that regard.

People always need something extreme to happen in order to be forced into an alternative. As long as exchanges keep semi functioning (which they do) people are more than happy to stay. I'm not sure what eventually will make people switch to dex's, but it will take a couple of years before we even see a noticeable switch. The convenience need to increase a lot, the volumes, fiat trading still isn't decentralized and probably never will, etc.

It almost seems that the only way for these exchanges to vanish is when the altcoin bubble pops and these exchanges don't have anything to stay open for.

It may hurt Bitcoin initially, but it's time to disconnect all BTC/XXX pairs and let the shitcoin market take care of itself. Let them trade against Ethereum or whatever shitty token created by the exchange itself.

# Capital flows into empty coins while it could/should have flown into Bitcoin.
# In order to cash out large sums of altcoins, it has to use Bitcoin's liquidity.
# Altcoins give this entire ecosystem a trashy reputation.
# Altcoins have NO purpose other than speculation.

All negative aspects; is there even something positive to say about altcoins?

Even Ethereum is the same. Yes, they did well in making sure their Ether coins are in demand, but other than people using them to buy themselves into ICO's there is no use.

Investing in any market is a gamble, regardless of the sentiment.

While people keep complaining about the price being low and whatnot, miners don't give a fack which likely only means that the price is still profitable for them. It has been like that for months straight, nothing can change that. If the price was low and unprofitable they just wouldn't keep adding gear to the network. Ok, one could say that they are stacking up coins hoping for a recovery that may or may not happen, but that's too speculative and nothing can be bought with that.

I think the bottom is in once the difficulty increases stagnate for months straight, or even turn into a decrease.

The price already went below the $6000 level. There was a semi large buy wall at Bitfinex that got pulled and it instantly went below $6000 at that time. I don't know if front running happened, but it was quite interesting to see nonetheless. Fake support, fake market, what else can we say about it?

That being said, the following 6th of February bottoms didn't break;

Bitstamp's $5920.7 -> yesterday $5940
GDAX's $5837 > yesterday $5929.3

In that case the first next bottom to be tested hovers around $5500 which will turn out to be a great short term dip to buy. If that one doesn't hold either, the next dip to buy is $5000 but let's first see how $6000 copes with the pressure. I am still confident that it will hold despite it only requires one dump to break it instantly.

If it breaks, we can be sure of the fact that the demand has decreased to such degree, that those playing the markets don't have any problems shaking it up or down with minimum resources.

$6150 at the time of writing.

It differs. If you put Bitcoin's volatility against the volatility that altcoins experience, then it's indeed less volatile, but it has its reasons for that.

The first reason is that Bitcoin's market is far more liquid, and the second reason is that people during corrections sell altcoins for Bitcoin which strengthens its position in the market as well. People don't trust altcoins, they just hop on board during increases since they need less money coming in to book higher gains. Once the party is over, they jump back in Bitcoin to protect their overall Bitcoin ratio.

Bitcoin goes up 2% altcoins 4-5%
Bitcoin goes down 2% altcoins 4-5%.

It's just a matter of timing your entry and exit points.

Just ignore all this nonsense. It perfectly demonstrates how due to a lack of interesting subjects they just skim through the blockchain to drop a bunch of random numbers and percentages. All these articles don't even take all different variables in consideration since their only incentive is to make a story interesting and exciting to read for newbies. Everything containing whales and manipulation translates into clicks and traffic, and thus income.

That's actually a percentage also based on non verifiable information. We don't know who owns what. We can only assume that the elite holds the majority of the circulating supply.

Also, you should thank holders for current levels, not whales. Holders make sure they are taking loads of coins out of circulation. These whales use their holdings against you, which is way more harmful if you don't know how everything here works.

These exchanges very likely have high ranked government officials in their board, which grants them the freedom to do as they please.

Back in the days when they were leading with millions of Bitcoins in daily trading volumes they almost terminated every retail trader by not only front running their orders, which is what high frequency traders depend on and are willing to pay big money for, but playing with the market in such a way that retailers will end up losing on the majority of their trades due to the manipulation. How can it be that these exchanges have never been punished for that? It's only possible when authorative figures close their eyes on purposely.

Any other exchange, especially in China, would have been raided and wiped out already.

Governments are happy as long as the mass follows everything they force through, and even today that's exactly the case. Governments understand that there is a certain percentage they can't control anyway, which is why they don't bother to waste any time on them. You can't lose that what you never had in the first place.

Great development however is that people slowly start to become more aware of how everything works, and when you have Bitcoin on your side, you have control over your wealth, which is an option people couldn't fall back on before.

China is the perfect example. Despite the crackdown on almost everything related to crypto, the local crypto economies are thriving more than ever. I would even dare to say that the 'underground' crypty economy right now is way bigger than the legal crypto economy during 2016 when China was still a big deal in people's eyes. It won't take long before China softens their regulations in order to prevent these economies from growing larger.

It's clear that their regulations have the opposite effect.

How can you regret something that you couldn't do anything about?

It's like saying if I was born earlier then I would be a millionaire because of this or that event. It makes zero sense.

I bought my first coins back in the days when they were under $25 a pop. Do I regret not having kept them? No, because I was a complete noob only looking to benefit from this volatile market, and it only worked against me. Buying high selling low and later on shitcoin investments wiped out nearly my entire holdings at that time. I'm glad I realized that what I did was wrong and started to improve where needed.

You can only blame yourself when you know that Bitcoin has the potential to increase significantly and even change the world, but don't actually act based on that understanding. That's when you can regret your poor decision and acknowledge how you missed out.