The trillion market cap is around $53700 if I recall, we came about $1000 short of hitting that. I am wondering if there are going to be people who are going to sell before the trillion marketcap hit thinking it might be the top.

Right now since $50K broke, there are no resistant areas really. Maybe the local top at $52600 however what areas of resistance are there really before $100K? Maybe $75K will be some resistance. However I just don't see it stopping in any of these arbitrary numbers.

Most people are waiting for $100K and most will take profits there. So maybe the top will be like $98 or $99K. Imagine wanting to sell at $100K, it tops at $99K and you need to wait another 4 years to get your target price.

Alot of people are looking at the Bitcoin MVRV Z-score and deciding when to sell. I think its currently on 7 and the red zone is around 7.5-10. Generally the last 3-4 peaks were within a 2 week period when this occured.

The formula is something like Market Cap - Realized Price  / Std of Market Cap.

So it basically goes up when the market cap increases but realized price stays the same. Meaning price sky rockets and people don't buy/sell and transact on the blockchain. So it seems we are close to the 7.5-10 area however last time we were at the same level, the BTC price had to almost double (11.2K to 20K) for the indicator to point at 10-11 Zscore.

Hence if you rely on this indicator and sell when BTC hits $55-60K you might sell way too early because it still might hit like $95K.

ETH going to crash 95%? So back to $100 ?

Its funny because I remember you ( I think it was you) who was saying that ETH will go to $2000 when ETH was $100. So you were pretty much spot on. I even assumed that ETH might hit max $400-500 when it was trading at $100. Never would of assumed it would break the ATH of $1400 with all those ICO people still dumping funds.

So I am getting nervous because you seem to be spot on when it comes to predicting these things. Did ETH crash 95% last time? The peak was $1420 and low was like $80 so 94% drop. Crazy.

Lol, I actually remember when you created that thread back in 2017. I am actually glad you started it because I was tired of seeing the same posts over and over again. I knew that this time it was going to be the same situation when I keep seeing new threads asking "How can I mine Bitcoins on my Macbook Air?".

Its funny because most of what you discussed is pretty much relevant today. Nobody knows what the future holds. Will ETH break $2K, will it go to $3K or did it peak yesterday? Will BTC go to $100K or did it just peak at $50K. Lots of unknowns.

The way it works is

When open interest is rising and market is rising its bullish.
When open interest is decreasing and market is rising its bearish.
When open interst is rising and market is decreasing its bearish
When open interest is decreasing and market is decreasing its bullish

However this situation right now is unique due to the high funding rates. On Bybit I think the daily funding rate was >1% for the past few days. Hence its resulted in high forward futures rates for months Feb, March, June.

Even the CME March Futures is around 5% premium. Hence some fund can easily short the CME March futures, send the same amount of capital to Coinbase and long an equal amount and profit off the difference in 4 months. My concern is what will happen when these high funding rates stop which will make the forward futures rates premiums decrease or disappear. These positions will need to be closed. Hence there will be unwinding and spot selling.

Question is... when will this happen. Stock market has been rallying for almost a year with rising volumes and call option trades and there is no stock market peak in sight. So who knows how long this will go on for.

I don't think hedge funds and companies with billions to invest in BTC will get scared when there is a dip. They are professionals and do this type of trading everyday. Most retail people are the complete opposite. They buy when price goes up because they get FOMO. However when we get a small pullback they get scared to buy. Or because they think it might go a little lower and it never does. I don't think hedge funds think like that.

Most likely they use old-school TA and can easily see that $40-42K would be the first area to buy some BTC and if it goes lower than add more at $35K area. I don't think they would get scared buying BTC at $42k which is essentially support on the daily chart. Most likely there are tons of people waiting for $42K so they can buy.

Yes you have been able to hedge your mining profits ever since margin trading was available in crypto, so if I recall Bitfinex was the first exchange to offer margin trading. So if you are making good money when ETH is $1900. Go and sell it on margin, or use a future exchange and sell it on their perp contracts or dated futures. Currently for June futures you will get a 10% premium so instead of $1900 you would get $2100 per ETH.

So if price falls... you make more mining than if you didnt hedge.
If price stays the same you make slightly more because you got the  10% premium
If price goes to like $3000 ETH and difficulty skyrockets you are losing money this way.

No way to hedge against hashrate and difficiulty jumps.

How do we know what price he will buy the $900 million worth at? I am just assuming that he and other funds/ institutions and companies that want Bitcoin on their balance sheet will most likely buy when it dips.

Buying right now seems very risky. Hence many institutions might not invest yet. However we had a 30% dip back in January so there is a good chance we might get another 30% dip and maybe he will buy in at that time.

I am assuming most companies would be comfortable buying in the $30-40k region.

Here is the thing,

At $3K nobody was buying... everybody was selling
At $50K nobody is selling... everybody is buying

A small $500 amount can buy up to $50000 worth of BTC. Someone basically only puts in $500 into the market and the counterparty needs to buy $50000 worth of crypto to hedge. So $500 can remove up to $50000 worth of supply from the market. This is similar to how a cheap $1 call contract in the stock market represents 100 worth of shares.

Now here is the situation. If there is little bid side liquidity how will the $50000 get closed? The most the $500 investor can lose is $500, where will the other $49500 come from?

This is not investment advice. I am not a financial advisor. I am just posting this for entertainment purposes.
Please POST relative information to the topic. Any low quality posts will be deleted

Where will Bitcoin top? We just broke $50K? So is $100K next. What about $250K. Honestly its impossible to predict the top. Easier honestly to predict when a bottom will happen rather than a top.

So what can you do to sell as close to the top as possible? I think we can analyze the bitcoin futures open interest.

Currently this is the open interest for BTC futures.
https://www.bybt.com/BitcoinOpenInterest

As you can see, in the last 12 months we went from $3.5B to $18.75B. This is crazy since back in 2018 the largest open interest was maybe $1.5B or so.

Why is the open interest so high? Well I think part of it is people going full leverage to make the most money possible. Another part can be people capturing the premium.

Currently its expensive to borrow fiat to go long on bitcoin. Most exchanges have run out of available USD funds to buy crypto and others have crazy funding rates. So hence why there is always a positive funding on BTC and ETH, usually 0.25% per day lately. Hence if you look at the June futures for BTC, they are currently at 11%.

So I think alot of the money that is entering crypto now, is mostly cash and carry trades. Someone prints $100,000,000 USDT and they invest that to capture the 11% premium within 4 months. Which is about 33% APR. Where else can you get that kind of interest.

Here is how its done.

Someone sends $100,000,000 (or any amount) to a crypto exchange.
They buy $100,000,000 worth of ETH or BTC on spot and at the same time they sell $110,000,000 contracts on the June futures exchange.
Wait 4 months. Sell the spot holding and get back $100,000,000 while they buy the 111,000,000 contracts position and they will net $11,000,000 in profit.


The reason this works is because currently the markets are balanced, there is lots of liquidity on both markets. The trouble might come when the premium dries up.

Say next month or in 2 months the 11% premium goes down to 1%. Most likely the arbitrator will want to close the position and get their 10% early rather than wait longer to get another 1%.

So what happens is they need to unload $100,000,000 worth on spot and buy $110,000,000 on futures.  The issue here is, eventually the bid side on the spot market might not be able to handle all this selling pressure. The futures exchange has 100x leverage so it can usually handle this type of volume. But if there are billions of these positions that are getting unwinded who will be able to close them?

Also consider this.

Say you short 1 BTC at $50,000 by "cash and carry" method. And price is $25,000 when you want to close. You will gain another 1 BTC in profit. So to close the trade you will need to sell 2 BTC to get back your $50,000. And as the price of BTC goes lower and lower that means more and more BTC supply needs to hit the bid side to close the trade.

Eventually what might happen is similar to what happened with Bitmex back in March 2020. The market was leverage long and there was billion of long liquidations and nobody to cover them. Hence why we got that flash crash.

There is alot of money entering crypto. However at these prices how do we know that this money is to actually spot long BTC and not do these "cash and carry" trades? We see these huge tether prints. How do we know its someone who is buying for long term cold storage spot hold? Or someone just milking the premium?

Leverage is very powerful. Especially 100x. Someone with basically $500 cash can long about 1 BTC worth using 100x leverage. Hence someone on the other side of that trade can arbitrage that 1 BTC worth, by actually buying $50000 without leverage on spot. Hence there is a similar type of squeeze going on here to a gamma squeeze. The issue will be when these bids disappear. Because that $50000 futures position will eventually need to be closed by someone selling $50000 worth of spot and if the money isn't there then there will be a long squeeze.

TL:DR Wait until the open interest starts to decline and no premium on the future contracts. Then most likely some large crash might be coming.

These 5% price jumps within 10 minutes, won't really help you. You will end up buying the top most of the time. Especially on low cap coins.

If you want some alerts you need to get creative.

One way is to set up some API and monitor any large Tether prints. Usually anything >$400,000,000 ends up causing a temporarily price bump as there are lots of bots and other people that always go long when there is a large tether print.

Another way is to track certain people that influence the markets like Elon Musk on twitter. Whenever he tweets anything releated to any crypto like DOGE or BTC. Usually there is a huge price surge one way or the other. Sometimes it fades, sometimes it doesn't.

These will help you the most.

Wasn't something similar like this done with the Xbox (or Xbox 2 or whatever its called) to mine Litecoin back in 2013.2014? If I recall the GPU inside the Xbox was the Tahiti chip Radeon 7950. That GPU was more or less the 7970/280X with a slightly lower core clock however it was the most efficient GPU to mine LTC at the time. And late 2013 GPUS were sold out everywhere so people decided to try and mine with the Xbox instead.

I have a feeling that if this is possible there will be a shortage of Xbox's everywhere due to GPU mining. So far all GPUs are sold out. Now people are buying gaming desktops and gaming laptops with GPUs inside to mine and if its possible to mine on a console then miners will start buying Xbox's and Playstations next. Crazy times...

$1.89B was liquidated however the total open interest is something like $17B in total for all the future exchanges. I don't know if you guys ever traded on Bitmex but I remember that a few times in 2018 and 2019 the open interest peaked at $1B and that was as high as it would go and when OI was at $1B usually there was a massive crash shortly after.

Bitmex was the largest, so if you add the other small exchanges the total OI was maybe $1.25B, or $1.50B. I think OKEx was 2nd place in terms of futures volume back then. And that was pretty much it. Now you got a dozen or so exchanges and OI is nearing $20B. There is an insane amount of money in crypto now compared to just a year ago. One year ago OI was like $3.5B.

Compare Aug 2020 when BTC peaked at $12.5K, OI was $5B or so. There was a nasty crash all the way to $10K, and OI dropped by $2B or so. Now at almost $20B, if the flood gates open, how will these positions find an exit? It could get lucky.

If you hold any fiat, tether or usdc. You can earn interest on this money by just collecting the premium on the future markets. Currently the ETH or BTC premium for June expiry is 9-10%. So all you need to do is make an account with a reputable futures exchange like Binance. Buy some ETH or BTC with your USD on the spot market. And then at the same time sell that same amount of ETH or BTC on the futures platform.

Wait until expiry and the premium will be gone and you will pocket the difference. This is more safe than doing any of this smart contract stuff on ETH which might have some undiscovered bugs. Just use 2FA and keep as little as you can on the exchange as long as your liquidation price is far away. Currently the rates are crazy. However the normal rate is usually 10% per year for USD funding.

We all know that $50K won't go out in a single attempt. Its basically a very important psycholgical number just like $20K. So many people are putting orders at $50K and smart people are putting orders at $49.5K or so. And some shorters are putting stops maybe at $50.1K question is what will be the outcome.

There are basically 3 outcomes to this important level.

1) We topped at $49.7K and won't see it until 3-4 years later. Basically just like 2017 topped out at $19.5K, this is very similar since we all assumed we would at least touch $50K, the smart traders sold slightly below and will rebuy lower.

2) We break the $50K, go to like $51K and then start to reverse and start the next bear market. This basically traps both the bull and bears. Where the bears take a loss at $50K and the bulls go long at $50K and end up losing money also. There is a very good chance this might actually occur.

3) We break $50K and head to the moon. This is also possible. We broke $20K sharply and haven't even tested it once. So there is also a good chance that this might occur also.

Yes but what I'm talking about here is more like arbitrage rather than speculative trading. Basically you are neutral on the position and don't care if the price of ETH goes up, down, or sideways you just want to milk the premium.

Leverage trading, especially on futures is highly difficult for most people to profit off. Sure we see people posting their gains daily here on this forum or on Crypto twitter however we all know what happens to 95% of all traders out there. They end up losing their profits, then their balance. And some even take out loans to trade and basically end up in debt.

Hence this is why its not good to see a futures premium this high, means that the markets are levelled to one side (buy side) and eventually when the rug is pulled they all will be rushing to the exits. The question however is... when. Will BTC breaks $50K and head to $100K or was $49.7K the top? Nobody knows exactly.

The only risk is if the exchange gets hacked or your account gets hacked. Basically counterparty risk since your coins are no longer in cold storage.

If you own ETH then it won’t really work unless you want to sell it completely where you would get paid 10% above market value. The way you profit off the premium is you need fiat or tether in your account. Say you got $1000 USDT. You would send to an exchange and buy $1000 worth of ETH. Which suppose is around 0.55ETH then at the same time you would open a June futures ETH short with a value of 0.55ETH which would be exactly $1100 contracts. When the last Friday of June comes around there will be no more premium. So you buy back your short ETH position where you get back $1100 and at the same time you sell the 0.55ETH and get your $1000 back. And $100 is your profit.

There is some risk involved. One of the main reasons is you need to keep your coins on the exchange as collateral. Basically you don't need to keep the entire amount since there is 100x leverage however you need to keep your leverage low enough not to get liquidated. So if you hedge $50,000 of BTC, you can keep 1 BTC on the exchange and never get liquidated or keep 0.5BTC on the exchange and your liquidation price will be at $100,000. So when it comes close to $100,000 you will need to send more BTC into the exchange. Max you would need to send would be the 1 BTC. Since when price rises and you use BTC as collateral so does your account value.


Yes but keep in mind you can only get 10% on your crypto USD or USDT or USDC. You can't do it with BTC. There is no high funding fees for BTC only USD. You can use any futures exchange like Binance, Bitmex, Bybit, Kraken, Bitfinex, etc.

This might be a little off topic but any of you guys taking advantage of the premium on the future derivative markets? Basically the June futures for ETH and BTC there is a 10% premium.

So if you got any type of fiat whether it’s USD, tether, USDC, etc you can buy on spot and at the same time sell on the futures and wait 4.5 months and get 10% for doing nothing pretty much.

Never seen the premium so high before, usually it’s 1% a month but you got Feb futures which expire in 10 days with a. 3% premium or far off futures like the Sept/Dec at 15/20% respectively. Seems that there is so much demand that the market makers are running out of funds to arb these markets. Open interest is thru the roof at 17B currently.

I used Bitpay many years ago, I am actually still surprised they are still around. When the credit cards were blocked by many countries I assumed they were out of business. Anyways here is the issue that I see with using Bitpay.

To fund your Bitpay account, you first need to send BTC to their address, so you first need send BTC into your Bitpay wallet, and then do a transaction and send from your mobile Bitpay wallet into your bitpay hot wallet and later on it will get sent to some bitpay main wallet, and you need to pay transaction fees for all 3 transactions. Most likely there is a way now to just send it from your hardware wallet into your Bitpay hot wallet but you still need to pay to have it sent from your designated bitpay deposit address which later is sent to some Bitpay main wallet. Yes, they charge you the transaction fee to clear any dust on their network. So at $5 a transaction that is around $15 alone on transaction fees.

Then to use the wallet, I think there was another 2% fee or so because that is the standard credit card merchant fee. If you use your CC to buy Groceries the merchant is charged like 2% or so and this is the fee you will need to cover on your end.

So as you can see there are tons of fees, so maybe good for large transactions like buying a car but not for small transaction like buying a coffee.