only to an extent. whales and large miners can withhold coins from the market, but nobody has this market cornered. and as the years go by, coins become more and more distributed. something like 5-10% of americans now own crypto. so the whales of yester-years really aren't as important anymore.

what matters most is all the supply from bagholders from 2017 (including institutions like novagratz' fund etc) and whether or not organic demand can outweigh that.

its waaaaay too early to say. how are you so confident the bear is done?

in any market, this whole $6000-$12000 trading range could be a bearish consolidation. i'd love to see things turn around, but by all trend-reading techniques i know, this is still a bear market. break above $8500 (higher high) and we can start believing otherwise.

that's how i felt about the price action in 2015. we kept hammering the $200 area (sometimes wicking below for a short time) and bouncing back. for me, that's usually a sign that support will fail and we should be ready for lower levels.

but amazingly, the level held. and if you look at the bitstamp chart and cut off the wicks, it looks like a quadruple bottom.

honestly, you never know with BTC. sometimes we find unicorns on the charts here.


what about a simpler explanation: strong demand exhausts supply. demand from investors. it doesn't matter who they are or why they're buying, but that's more believable to me than miners perpetually propping up the price.

yeah, or vice versa. alts had their run before BTC in 2017.

these things work in cycles (the money flow between alts and BTC). it happens time and time again. one stays stagnant, the other skyrockets, then profits starts flowing into the laggard.


i think it's just impossible to tell right now. maybe when a bull run starts and we see what the market looks like.

the whole idea of market caps in crypto and BTC dominance, especially considering the proliferation of altcoins and tokens---it's all really fuzzy and arbitrary.

exactly. that's the key that most people don't understand: news is secondary or tertiary to actual market sentiment and overall commitment of traders. that's why good news in bear markets often causes little short squeezes that are just sold into by underwater investors. and then the bleed continues.

i've seen so many people ask, "why isn't price going up? there's so much good news!" and IMO the answer is, "that should actually inform you that we're in a corrective/bear market. so you should expect price to go down, or sideways at best, until the correction is over."

that dump the other day from $7100s to $6100s was more impressive though.

it's bitcoin, both the pumps and the dumps are always impressive!


i hope you're right, as i find range markets and bull markets easier to trade (especially after we've already fallen 70% from the top). but i'm skeptical that miners have endless capital to prevent liquidating forever. we need real demand to turn things around.

he's still been pretty solid on the bigger picture. i think he (rightfully) has become less and less precise because this market trades much choppier than in the old days---it's super algo-heavy now. it's simply less predictable than it used to be. so as a trader, i fade less and less, and i ride trends more and more.

we got a nice short squeeze today off $6k. hopefully a sign that he's right about $6k being on the low end of an accumulation range.

no, not at all. BTC has spent the vast majority of its trading history below this price level. this is not an ATL, lol!

anyone who is sitting on gains for the past 9 years has plenty of incentive to lock in some profits, once they realize the current bubble cycle is over and price could stay bearish for quite some time.

personally, i'm still hoping that $5000s is the bottom of the range, but it looks pretty ugly. i won't be surprised to see $3000 or lower.

obviously, this depends on jurisdiction. but when it comes to the courts, usually we're looking for what's reasonable. so let's think about that:

i could generate a million forks of BTC right now (that nobody uses, of course). is it reasonable to assume that an exchange is obligated to download all my million forked clients and send me my forked coins?

of course not!

so i think it has to boil down to whether there is actual demand for a fork, and whether the fork is even active at all. either way, i'd be very curious to see arguments heard and court decision issued where the exchange explicitly says in its terms that it won't pay out forked coins.

all i said is "i wouldn't rule it out" because you called people delusional for thinking we could see a 94% drop from the top. we literally only have a handful of bubbles to study, and one of them dropped 94% from the top!

you make it sound like dropping another > 10x or > 100x from there is just as likely. why?


when it comes to markets, most people are wrong most of the time in their trades and predictions. i don't think we're going back to $1000, but i need to remain open to all realistic scenarios and trade accordingly. i became much more successful as a trader when i stopped having the attitude that "x won't happen" or "y can't happen." that mentality will get you killed in the markets because it prevents you from acting until the "unthinkable" has already occurred.

i'm not sure of anything right now, and i've stepped away from trading until there is a clear trend or range. if the market can break above $8500, then i'd be more confident in a long sideways accumulation period. i definitely think $3000 is still a possibility (maybe further). we've spent quite a long time in this $6k-$9k range = lots of new bagholders if the bottom falls out again.

it didn't really "create" another dip. that dip was likely coming anyway. this is a bear market until proven otherwise---and it doesn't help that sentiment is so bullish.


really? it wouldn't be outside the realm of normal. that's roughly the equivalent of the 2011 bubble pop. that would probably be the worst case scenario, but i wouldn't rule it out!

yeah i remember laughing pretty hard over the timing of circle's exit back then. also funny to see them buying poloniex right when the bubble popped. these companies get caught up in the hype and exuberance just like us regular folk.

the better capitalized companies will weather the storm; others, less so.


i suspect these guys are in it for the long term. they say the company has been in planning for 14 months. with a november launch date, at least they've given themselves ~ a year since the bubble popped.

like you say, it's impossible to predict. it's possible (though unlikely perhaps) that we could have a situation like summer 2013 too.

finally, an opinion i can get behind!

i really wish bitcoiners with dollar signs in their eyes would stop glorifying third party custodians and acting like paper "backed" by BTC is a good thing for anybody. even once we get past the issue of trust, paper markets (because of their heavy volume) can also potentially be used to manipulate the market. just ask gold traders.

meh, this sounds like more empty hype (just like the ETFs). "if you build it, they will come!"

you assume there is all this latent demand for bitcoin exposure that is waiting on the sidelines---why? it's not how the human mind (and therefore markets) work. people and institutions who want bitcoin exposure because of its astronomical gains don't say to themselves, "no problem, i'll just wait 2 years or 6 years for the right derivative security product to be approved by the SEC!" lol. and there isn't much volume in the regulated swaps and futures markets. what makes this so different?

also, it's not all good news. like you said, all this latent demand you think exists is from people who don't understand the point of BTC anyway. we like to think people understand the difference between "real assets" and "paper assets" but most don't. and if there is so much latent demand for paper bitcoins, as you suggest, that opens big opportunities for spot market manipulation, just like the gold markets: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4826941.msg43553439#msg43553439

bear markets are caused by excessive supply and low demand, not a lack of good news lol.

i've been saying this for a long time: good news will never reverse a bear market. at best, it's a catalyst for a short squeeze.

bad news will never reverse a bull market, either. just think of the silk road bust in 2013, or the btc-e bust in 2017. the people still clinging to the notion that "the 2014 bear market was caused by mt gox" don't know how to read charts and don't understand market cycles (wyckoff, elliot, etc).

it's inevitable. the foundation is being built as we speak, and there's really no way around it. the banksters have made their choice. they want a piece and they're making their move.

it's always so funny to me (and sad) to see bitcoiners cheering on the institutionalization and financialization of BTC. the same people that cry about fiat money printing want paper markets for BTC, and they want it badly too! because these securities/derivatives---they're all "fully backed." hahaha! too funny......

as long as the public understands the difference between real bitcoins and paper bitcoins, then the spot market should reign supreme (meaning the banksters shouldn't be able to manipulate the market too heavily).

now, with that in mind: does the public understand the difference between real gold and paper gold?

interesting points here! they became difficult to use for some (bip70), and expensive to use for others. i'd love to see a survey among those who've used bitpay and their feelings about the "network fees" and mandated bip70 usage. if less and less people are using bitpay, there could be other reasons for it too.

i've recently used a couple large merchants who didn't use bitpay (they used coingate and coinpayments). so bitpay is the biggest game in town by far, but i'm not convinced they own the market either. i think maybe their market share is even falling.

that's true. i remember first getting into bitcoin to play poker on sealswithclubs back in 2012. i forgot about it, then when i saw the april 2013 bubble, i immediately bought amazon gcs with all my coins. then the price kept going up and i got hooked to the markets....


good point. however, we should also note that total network transactions were strongly trending upwards through the april 2013 bubble, then sharply dropped from may-june 2013. we see an even more pronounced increase in total network activity from august-december 2017, during the last bubble: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&daysAverageString=7

this tells me there is a correlation between price bubbles and network activity---it's not just that more people are spending via bitpay. if there is an increase an network activity, we should expect some ~proportionate increase in bitpay activity as well.

interesting, thanks for that. i've never been able to figure out why mandating BIP70 would be a good move for them (unless it's true that people screw up the address/amount and so they want to avoid dealing with that).


what makes you think that's what most people do? on the contrary, i think most people sell the bottom and/or buy the top. they get greedy when price is rising and don't want to sell. that's why the old warren buffet saying always applies.