no need to disparage all TA---just bad TA. relying on a weekly positive MACD in a corrective or bear market is just silly. it turned positive twice in the 2014-15 bear market and we still made new lows afterwards.


i feel like the media is always just chasing price. they're often good counter-indicators. i see the same things in real markets. they hype things at the top and talk smack at the bottom, and they're always looking to explain price movements with news stories. they're just clueless about how markets work.

i'll have to watch that debate with samson mow---dude is usually pretty sharp on twitter. i suppose the live debate context is a lot different.

jimmy song is definitely a smart dude and knows his stuff when it comes to bitcoin. but unfortunately, he's too damn nice. i'm guessing he'll let roger walk all over him. roger knows how to speak with authority even when he's full of shit.

it's interesting when you consider that newly mined coins carry a premium---no taint. and they're a hell of a lot easier to transport than barrels of oil or fiat money. no banking or third party custody required.


it would be interesting to see state-backed mining emerge in Iran. is that possible? i imagine that would be some fuel for the anti-crypto crowd in washington.

what about paper wallets? i've still got some love for them!

i quite like the idea of scannable paper bills, though it's more of a novelty to me than anything else. i definitely think payment via smartphone is the direction we're heading here. it's tough to see LN being convenient or easy-to-use without a mobile device in the context of brick-and-mortar stores.

agreed, lots of supply to work though. and even $10k is clearly a major resistance level. not just for psychological reasons, but because we have a long term price pivot there where lots of bulls got trapped. after that comes the $11.5k-12k area (where we double topped) and $14k-15k, both of which should be good areas to sell.

if we get to $14k+ i'm selling into it pretty hard. it's too early for a bubble; sentiment just doesn't feel right. i still foresee another leg down like the 2013 correction (if not worse).

without a channel open with each store already, the setup seems to assume that both nodes are well-connected (whether via various channels or a hub of sorts). if the bills weren't for the right channel (so to speak), i suppose the store wouldn't receive the payment---easy enough.


sounds like a case where i'd prefer to send a standard bitcoin payment.

my thoughts exactly!

anyway, as someone who lived through that post-2013 bear market, what bulls really want want is for the bears to be confident and the permabulls to be quiet. that's the sentiment that bull markets are born from.


tom lee is just a running joke among bitcoin traders at this point.

the price will go up when it's good and ready. patience is a virtue.

non-linear scaling mechanisms like the lightning network (once user-friendly) could make BTC more usable and therefore could encourage increased network growth.

but ultimately, there is no "feature" that is going to change things drastically. bitcoin's primary use case is money. it has a limited supply, so as the network grows, price should rise. enjoy the ride!

i love how they throw this in:

what is this, 2013? who gives a shit about merchant adoption?


couldn't have said it better myself. so many clueless commentators and self-styled "experts" try to come up with explanations for price movement and volatility. but the ignore the simplest explanation: market cycles.


i was actually just thinking about that---very similar price structure. seems too soon to have based for another bubble yet though.

no doubt, the state of crypto media is pathetic.

still, greed is one of the beauties of bitcoin---it's why it works. miners don't provide unprecedented security for free; they do it out of greed. if you recognize the effect of metcalfe's law + limited supply, price should continue to rise as long as the network continues to grow. from that perspective, it's hard to expect people not to focus on price. if you understand BTC, you're gonna want to own some because it's simply economically rational!

i was never sold on the whole "currency" thing anyway. to me, bitcoin was (and is) supposed to be money. hard money. that could mean a highly circulated medium of exchange (i.e. "currency") but i don't think it has to.

yeah i definitely get that. i've had my credit cards hijacked before and fraudulent purchases made. fortunately these days, credit cards always offer 0% liability for fraud. so the only loss is your time (you have to check your statements and report fraud if it occurs).


excellent point that i forgot to consider. i've had to charge back against dishonest merchants before, and in those cases i was very glad to have used a credit card.

and if there ever is a dispute with a merchant, it's better to have the money tied up as a credit card balance---rather than missing from your bank account (debit cards) or your bitcoin wallet.

just like BTC = protection for merchants from chargebacks, credit cards = protection for consumers from unfair or deceptive business practices.

just don't forget how the last run to $8500 felt, or the prior run to $10k. we don't have a bullish structure here yet.


while i'm hopeful this might develop into a legitimate mid term uptrend, we're a long ways away from establishing that, and people are a tad too bullish for my liking.

the low $7000s should be a major resistance level, given the previous action there. bears have been selling the bounce consistently, so we should definitely be prepared for a run back to the mid-$6000s.

this is exactly what i'd expect, although at this sample size i'd take it with a grain of salt. cryptocurrency has definitely been embraced far more by the younger generations. it's partly just a matter of technological inclination. but i also think it makes sense in the context of the housing bubble (rising costs of renting and homeownership) and stagnant wage growth. it's getting harder and harder to save, at a time when living costs are rising.

older people with savings and assets probably have a much lower risk threshold. but if you're a millennial (or younger) with little money to invest, you gonna put it into an overinflated stock market for slow and modest gains? not me......

oh great, tom lee is bullish again. i want to know when he's bearish---then i can be confident that the bottom is in.

i thought he'd started to tone it down as we head into Q4. he was stuck in euphoria mode most of the year, and had finally started to backtrack on his "$25k by end of year" calls.

i guess all it takes is a little mini uptrend on the daily chart for him to start calling for a new ATH again. permabulls gonna permabull.

i never know what these people mean by "blockchain technology."

AFAIK, blockchains leverage decentralization to remove trusted intermediaries or central authorities from transactions. if their network doesn't do that, it's not "blockchain technology."

and i'm at a loss for why a bank would implement a blockchain to store its own customers' personal information. use a database and focus on securing the data!

i guess it worked for bitcoin last year: hard forks/spinoffs added value, and the market kept rising. unfortunately for ver, that was an obvious bull market. this is not.....

where can i find a comparison of the proposed fork(s) vs the current version?


...do they? fixing transaction malleability and building a scalable payments network on top of BTC are huge, but do you really think that could kill the need/demand for altcoins?

it's obvious that BTC can't implement every possible feature or speak to every possible use case. and we shouldn't want it too either---we don't need a bloatchain (we're seeing the downsides of that with ethereum's design). and contentious changes are contentious (hence the launch of bcash last year). also, altcoins are testbeds for BTC---consider ones that implemented segwit last year before it was activated in bitcoin.

regardless of what gets implemented in bitcoin (and in reaction to whatever doesn't get implemented), there will always be a niche for altcoins. one use case that immediately comes to mind is mandatory private transactions, like monero. that's never gonna happen in bitcoin.

payment processing (and the fees born out of it) is only one side of the equation, though. credit cards aren't just a replacement for cash. they offer credit lines, and rewards.

IMO, a lot of consumer spending is fueled by access to easy credit and spending rewards from card issuers (cash back, airline miles, etc). how is BTC going to satisfy those needs?

merchants need to accept what consumers want to use. it's not the other way around. for BTC to make credit cards obsolete, consumers must prefer BTC to using credit. transitioning away from a credit-fueled and high-spending/no-saving consumer economy is a much larger issue than "merchants pay high credit card fees, BTC is better."

recently, i've been paying 1 sat/byte for non-urgent transactions and something like 2-5 sat/byte where i need next block confirmation. fees are pretty cheap right now.


i see that no one has mentioned this tool for estimating fees: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h

it's the most accurate tool i've found for comparing mempool transactions by fee rate. it blows earn.com out of the water. and visually, it's really easy to use.

the 2011 correction was worse, dropping by about 94%. i wasn't around, but it's much more brutal looking than 2014 from looking at the chart.


this is totally over-exaggerated. gox didn't have 90% of BTC trading volume, lol! it's funny, every time i hear these claims about the dominance of gox, the % of global volume they supposedly had gets higher and higher.

they maybe had 90% of "western" trading volume (compared to bitstamp, btc-e). but i'm not sure about that either. gox was only averaging ~200k volume per week at the end of 2013! btc-china alone did more than half that volume, and i believe huobi was more prominent than BTCC at that time. and to me, it really felt like china was fueling the bubble, not gox. and this was years before the volumizer bots came around.

also, just compare gox's volume between april 2013 and november 2013. between those two bubbles, gox lost lots of volume to other exchanges. by 2014, there is no way in hell they controlled anywhere near 90% of the market! probably a good deal less than 50%.....

i was about to say..... this OP reminds me of the hype around the 2013 cyprus financial crisis. people kept hyping it for months even though there was no evidence that it was increasing demand for BTC.


some people believe that a major/global economic crisis would somehow be good for BTC (perhaps because it would expose the weaknesses of other assets). but IMO, it really depends how risky BTC is perceived to be---as you pointed out, it definitely hasn't achieved "safe haven" status. in times of crisis, i would expect money to flow into historically stable and hard assets.


that illustrates the point nicely.