What? I don't understand.

The entire rally is gone, with the downswing appearing stronger than the upswing.

How and why is this going to hold again?

We'd have to break the long term upward trend line first. We're not close to that yet.

So on 1/5/17 it falls 22% (currently down 16% from high today).

From 7/30/16 to 8/1/16 it fell 29%.
From 6/19/16 to 6/22/16 it fell 29%.
On 1/14/16 it fell 17%.
From 11/9/15 to 11/10/15 it fell 23%.

All of these stats cherry pick the highest to lowest points on the worst days in the last 15 months.
All of these falls quickly recovered (i.e. very few trades actually took place at the low points).
All of these falls occurred after sharp rises, and the new equilibrium points settled higher than the old equilibrium points before the rise.

Before you start comparing to 2013/14, you first have to argue why this is anything different from the other setbacks during the current bull run that started in October 2015.

The big news isn't that BTC-E is $40 cheaper than everywhere else, it's that the Chinese exchanges are trading $130 above everyone else! Their lead is usually $20-$40. What's going on?

Bitcoin did not crash in 2014. It entered a long and brutal bear market in order to recover from the over-exuberance in 2013. That's an important distinction.

Right now, at the very least the price needs to stay above $800, or else the entire recent rise will have been for naught. But I don't think it can go down that far. There are too many signs there's been a real increase in demand, so the new equilibrium price should be higher than the old one.

Happy New Year to you too, Fak! It appears the price has already enjoyed a $30 hike this year.

Doesn't look that way to me.

Unless you believe 97% of positive balance addresses have less than a dollar's worth... and that this is somehow an indication of wealth inequality.

Never mind. That probably is the way you think.

Of course most addresses don't have any coins in them anymore.

An address that has not had coins spent from it is more secure than one which has. Therefore, the most prudent thing to do when spending a partial balance is to send the rest to a new address that you also have the key for.

Sample size of one, most of the addresses I've used now have a zero balance. But I know this is common practice for many people and businesses as well. Not to mention mixers and other cases where coins rapidly change hands.

It briefly crossed over on Huobi earlier today.

Is this not a head and shoulders forming?

This is all because Satoshi was being too cute with the coin denominations when he set it up.

The cap is 21 million coins, that's 8 digits. So by making each coin divisible by 8 digits, the decimal point gets placed right in the middle. That's elegant on paper, but awkward in the economy.

The initial 50-coins-per-block era was to represent the era in which 50% of the coins were mined, the 25-coin era for the next 25%, etc. Again, elegant on paper, but not so practical when blocks are worth such an odd number of coins in future eras.

It would be really nice if we all could indeed agree to use a smaller unit denomination, especially if the mBTC reaches dollar parity. But a change in convention tends to lag behind in decentralized systems. It's a minor downside and we're still much better off than centralized systems overall, but it is a downside nonetheless.

No matter what happens, it will be impossible to prove the old ATH has anything to do with it.

There are new traders, new markets, new exchanges, new infrastructure... the best you can argue is some kind of psychological impediment but there are plenty of other market forces besides that, and many people who don't care since they weren't around back then.

So while I don't know what the market will do at that level, I will be more inclined to attribute what it does to things other than what happened in 2013.

Part of my point was that this current move is arguably small even when compared to other moves in the last 15 months, but yes, the difference from the 2013 bubble is even more stark.

The interesting thing to think about looking back is the number of actors. The price was more volatile back in the day not just because of the Willy bot, but also simply because there were fewer traders. Fewer traders means smaller changes in emotion affect the market more, adding to volatility. Unfortunately I don't know what the numbers then and now are, and I'm not sure anybody knows (other than there are probably more now).

I'm going to guess this is going to rally pretty hard through January. Perhaps not quite as hard as the last few days and with minor corrections of course, but I'll go out on a limb and say we blow that ATH out of the water.

Then it will correct a bit more in February and settle down in March.

Did you read my first sentence?

This isn't chart or market depth analysis, just a look at long term perspective.

I always look at log charts when trading anything, not because exponential growth looks like a straight line (though that's useful), not because it makes high values seem close (though that's fun), but because equal vertical distances represent equal percentage changes, which is more useful in trading than linear distances.

With that said, look at the long term path Bitcoin has traded at over on Bitstamp since 2012:



See that purple oval highlighting the last two candles? That's our current rally. Not only is it nothing so far compared to the giant bubbles of 2013, but it's peanuts even compared to the other two major run-ups since the bull run started in late 2015.

Granted, each of those did have some correction after reaching the top of their respective rallies, but the price still leveled off significantly higher than where it started. If this is merely the third of such mini-hypes on this bull run, we're still going a ways up before this is over.

And this is just my gut about a different topic, and I could be wrong, but I feel this may turn out to be a bit more significant of a rally than the last two.

Edit: The snapshot was taken when Bitstamp first hit $910.

Thank you as well, Fakhoury, for creating this wonderful thread. It's my favorite on the forum and I've been shadow following it for a long time. I only recently recovered my account so I could share that video I was excited to see in my subscription feed yesterday.

Come on people, this is ask. Ask doesn't have any coins.

It's a troll post. A shit post. STFU and GTFO, etc.