In fact, that point I mentioned right in the OP, which you included in your quote, by the way. I highlighted that we are not invulnerable or immune to the impact that a big whale could easily deliver. But then the price would plunge however low, even to single digits if, for example, Satoshi himself comes out of his hideout and drops his stash of coins on our heads. But there are more than enough bearwhales beside him who can dump the price below what we could reasonably think of.

I agree with almost everything you said, except the the profit-taking part. It looks like the whole market switched into a day-trading mode of operation, but it is not necessarily profit takers who don't allow the price to rise higher. The swings are too small, and it may be an artificial resistance created by someone who doesn't want the price to rise. Today, when the market sentiment is all doom and gloom, it won't take a lot of financial resource to keep prices contained and constrained, especially to the upside.

These are all good things and wisdoms, though somewhat trite and hackneyed, but to a novice trader they don't really mean a shit. Words, in general, don't mean a lot unless they represent real life experience, but you can't explain experience in words. It is something which you can only acquire with time making as well as avoiding all kinds of mistakes. And I can't possibly agree that it is a HOLDers game. In speculative markers - where Bitcoin truthfully belongs to - it is a suicidal mission that will leave you with heavy losses and likely no money in the end.

Myself, I never understood that thing. Why is playing short term more risky? I for one am inclined to think in quite the opposite direction. When you are scalping, day trading, or doing whatever which involves only short-term holding of an asset, you basically give up potential profits in exchange for a smaller, or shorter risk exposure. Obviously, here I'm talking about experienced traders, not some newbies who don't know what they are doing, whether it be trading short or long term. All things considered, long-term holding is in fact more risky. It just happened that crypto had been very forgiving in this regard till recently, but these days may well be over by now.

If people bought at 5k and below, they more than likely had already sold at 10k, then bought again, and so on, till the December peaks. Apart from that, a lot of people were buying on the way down to 10k and below - with 12k being the major support back then, otherwise we wouldn't see so much resistance right now. These days Bitcoin seems to be stuck in a pretty narrow range, and whenever the price makes an effort to rise higher, it invariably retreats soon thereafter. We have seen this cycle repeat at least a few times during the last two weeks.

In short, neither up nor down.

I don't see how you are disagreeing with my point. If you read my post carefully, you will see that I don't say it is just the supply drying up. Actually, I say it is both the demand going up because of lower prices and the supply tapering off on the same account. To sum it up, at some point in price and time we should see a convergence event where both these tendencies meet and match each other. That will be a quasi-stable price from which an entirely new trend should develop in due course.

It is not a sign of recovery, and we are already back on the downtrend again. It is just people who are eager to mistake regular volatility for real growth. But we are nowhere near that. We would need consistent and powerful growth for at least a couple of weeks to reliably speak of a trend reversal. In other words, we are not done yet with sliding down. Though I myself sincerely hope to be wrong on this one.

Well, it doesn't look like it is going to overshoot to the upside. The effort to keep over 7000 seems to have failed. It just proves that nothing has changed since the beginning of this year - apart from prices spiraling down most of the time. Whenever Bitcoin makes an effort to shoot up, people start jumping off the ship - or the train, and then we are back to square one. And the square one here means continuation of the spiraling down.

I have to disagree with this attitude. It may look like it helps increase the value of Bitcoin, but all it actually does - in the best case scenario - is raise the price of Bitcoin. But because the former is not the latter, the discrepancy between the two blows out of proportion that ends up in extreme volatility. The effect of these levels of volatility we are yet to see, but it can be said with certainty that it won't facilitate Bitcoin's adoption in the real world.

I second this view. Payment channels may be useful for major players like exchanges, wallets, and their likes - theoretically, but for a small guy there are hardly any benefits. But even with the big guns it is not all that simple and straightforward. For instance, if you use an online wallet and your merchant uses it too, then Lightning Network will offer no particular advantage to either of you. Exchanges don't need this technology either simply because it is their clients who pay the fees and minimizing it via Lightning Network doesn't look like a trivial thing even if an exchange wants to implement it.

Myself, I can't think of plausible ways how that problem can be efficiently solved in practice. Yet I agree that without adjusting the supply of a coin if such a need arises, in a mostly automatic way, it may become a major roadblock on the road toward smooth expansion of an economy if a cryptocurrency becomes a regular means of exchange there. In this respect, Bitcoin is like gold of the 19th century, when the latter had become a hindrance instead of a valuable tool for facilitating free exchange of goods. After people realized the shortcomings of the gold standard, they turned to fiat not backed up anymore by this metal or any specific asset. Maybe, we are in a similar situation right now. Simply put, if we don't know a solution, it doesn't mean that there is none.

Well, somehow I thought I wouldn't need further explanations but it seems that many people didn't understand what I meant. Okay, I will try to explain my point in detail below.

People often act without thinking twice, but this is not the case when prices have been low for nearly 3 months already. For example, you bought at $19k and you didn't sell at 15k, 12k, and so on, then selling at 5k and below is psychologically meaningless to you because you already accepted your loss. You have your capital halved and then halved again, and now you have like 25% left of it. To me, it makes no sense selling in these circumstances because it is unlikely that Bitcoin will fall substantially below relative to the loss you already suffered. Indeed, it can fall from 5k down to 1k, but the new loss will be pretty irrelevant to you psychologically because by that time you have already lost most of your capital anyway. In other words, it's no use crying over spilt milk.

I strongly support your stance. In my opinion, we will fare better if we look at recent volatility levels. Today's price doesn't look very stable to me. I know that past behavior doesn't mean anything but I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin rises a couple thousand dollars overnight like it had happened less than 2 months ago. Apart from that, I take TA, and especially TA in this market, with a spoonful of salt. If you need a crutch for your trading decisions, then definitely use it. Otherwise stay away from it, as simple as it gets.

I come to think that we can't fall massively below 5,000 dollars per BTC - if ever - unless some major whale - of the Mt. Gox trustee's scale - decides to cash out. I base my assumption on the premise that people who bought coins at high prices like over $12-$15k won't be selling at prices below some psychological limit because selling at such prices will be pointless and their only viable option will be to continue holding. So it is not just about demand building up, it is also as much about supply running dry at lower prices. That could potentially lead to less volatility, at least temporarily until a new long-term trend gets established.

Past behavior is not an indicator of future performance.

You could just as easily have created a similar sequence in late December and then started to claim that Bitcoin was going to hit $30,000 in January - well, some people actually did exactly that. The price could fall something from today's levels but we already see a lot of support and resilience at current prices. And it is not just about demand building up, it is also about supply running dry because no one is going to sell at such low prices. It simply makes no sense.

I'm afraid these times lie in a too-distant future that we could make any reliable prediction about their coming. Other than that, I don't see what is going to change that would make Bitcoin into a full-fledged currency. Fiat is not going away anyway, so it will be used as a primary means of exchange, while cryptocurrencies will be used for speculation and, in the best case scenario, as a proxy to fiat, definitely not as a self-sufficient means of payment.

I came to the conclusion that stores don't accept crypto because people don't want to spend it in the first place - they prefer to hold their coins - and not the other way around. Shops are eager to accept anything if that contributes to demand and leads to higher consumption. Some people say that volatility is the major issue with wider adoption of Bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies but I doubt that as you can easily hedge volatility, and this is what payment processors are likely doing anyway.

I agree that it is not a deadly sin, at least none of the established seven of them, but it can still be deadly to the coin being tightly held. Many people think that the more coins people stash away, the higher will be the price in the end. Personally, I don't think this is or will be the case in reality. If there is a real need for a cryptocurrency, scarce supply will only lead to the emergence of alternative coins which are going to offer essentially the same benefits transaction-wise. As a matter of fact, it is the way things already are in the cryptoverse.

Well, that actually depends on the purpose and timeframe of your investing endeavor. For instance, some people invest exclusively for short term only. Obviously, such investments don't make much sense with the falling markets unless you are looking for an arbitrage opportunity or for shorting. There's still a lot of room to fall further, and as a trading wisdom says, do not catch falling knives. I think this adage is fully applicable to Bitcoin today.

That's the point I'm trying to deliver around here myself and what I get in reply is that my "understanding of cryptocurrency is very limited". In any market without exception hodlers are canon fodder. As an old Wall Street saying warns, bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered. Pigs here are those who are excessively greedy, basically another name for hodlers, who do not close their positions at the right moment, obsessed with and possessed by greed.