I'm actually very conservative when it comes to the geopolitical tensions and their *assumed* impact on Bitcoin. I strongly believe that most of the correlation that we have seen so far is pure coincidence.

People within crypto are cherry picking just to help them justify their bullish narrative, while they purposely discard all the non correlated moves we have had in the past. It's somewhat understandable but looks a bit silly.

Back in 2018 no one said a word about how stocks greatly outperformed Bitcoin, while this year's bull run has been put against stocks in the way that they suck as an investment and Bitcoin is superior....

You don't gain much by being optimistic without there being some underlying technicals that back it up. Being overly optimistic or negative only leads to more disappointment because you aren't ready for a different outcome.

As a Bitcoin bull I see sub $10k prices as another opportunity to dollar cost average and therefore get more satoshis for my fiat. I don't mind some longer term sub $10k consolidation at all.

People a while ago said they regret not having bought below $10k, and now we have visited sub $10k levels they are no longer interested. Only when we go back to $14k they will blame themselves again for not buying below $10k...

I think the market as a whole has been leaning towards a more bearish scenario, which can be seen by looking at the short versus long ratio. People expect the price to take another dive and I can't blame them.

Important to point out is that we have seen the market go against the sentiment more than once lately, so it wouldn't really surprise me if we see a bounce up from here looking at the shorts. We'll see what happens in the coming days.

After a pretty strong decline from the $14k mark we are still hovering above the $10k mark-- if you asked people in January of this year if they could see $10k be possible this year, they would have laughed in your face.

You don't have to be a bear to short an asset. Most of the shorts are from unbiased traders just following what the charts present them. Today they can be short, but tomorrow they might shift to a long position.

The more rational traders don't focus on much other than the very short term, and the short term has been in favor of a more bearish outlook, while the mid to long term is still bullish overall.

I do however agree that accumulation is a smart choice. If you only allocate a small percentage of your investment account to each entry point, you should be able to buy the market down for a long time would it keep sinking.

Miners have never sold the major part of their earnings to begin with. If after the block halving the price tanks, they might end up unloading more coins because of how their operational cost is still the same.

If the price does go up, the number of coins they sell might be lower compared to how many coins they sell today, but the dollar value of their sales will keep going up and therefore eat through more available market liquidity.

The dollar amount miners need every month to stay operational only increases as we have learned from the previous years. Lower block inflation doesn't change that at all.

Overall, it all comes down to what cycle we're in. If we're going through a bear market where liquidity is leaving the market, the low rate of block inflation will not help you at all, the price will keep going down anyway.

Makes little sense. They can already do that with gold derivatives so what's the point of using something like Bitcoin? Bitcoin is too speculative and I don't even want my government to be that reckless.

Central banks have been buying gold like there is no tomorrow, especially when it comes to Russia, India and China. The rally in the gold price has done them well knowing that they own hundreds of billions of this metal.

Bitcoin hasn't really been battle tested yet. People here (me included) just assume it will go to the moon, but what if it doesn't? Bitcoin needs decades more of growth to show what it is made of.

It was a very questionable move from Coinbase's side to list that coin. It doesn't matter that you as exchange do not allow people to utilize its privacy feature, because you still provide liquidity to a coin that inherently goes against the terms of banks.

This is why I also hope that Bitcoin won't see any native privacy enhancement features implemented. This is the start of a new move that Japan has started, and now we see the UK adapt to it too, and more countries will follow soon.

The more exotic garbage you have listed, the more likely it is that your banking partner will eventually tell you to look for a different bank to partner with. Banks don't gain much from providing services to a crypto exchange so there is not much to lose.

I wouldn't call going from $3k to $14k a mini bull run. People are so used to 2017's bull run that they benchmark every single increase against that bull run and from there assume there is much more to gain from here.

There is no bull run standard as to how much % it has to go up. We might be heading towards another one year bear market now, it's definitely possible. It's not something I expect to happen, but I'm definitely not discarding that outcome.

People need to put their bias aside for a moment and put their rational investor cap on. There are just as many bearish scenarios to point at as there are bullish scenarios. Always be ready for the unexpected.

I would assume the asset value since it isn't a unit of account. It has a dynamic price that moves up and down against the actual fiat currencies it's paired to. It's essentially just an altcoin if you think about it.

Stablecoins have lost their purpose the moment exchanges started to pair them against other fiat currencies and even the actual underlying fiat currency, which is retarded.

It shouldn't be possible to pump or dump a stablecoin far above its underlying fiat currency value. The moment exchanges introduced pairs like USD/USDT the purpose of these stablecoins has lots its significance.

Obviously, people would poke fun of Tom Lee and his multitude of wrong predictions. Tim Draper has an immense number of Bitcoin he acquired years ago by being the highest bidder at the FBI auctions.

Tom Lee has never said anything about him holding Bitcoin, so I assume that he isn't in on this market-- which I hope he isn't looking back at how he continuously fails to understand how this market works.

One would think that not owning coins would make you unbiased, but given the moon boy sentiment of the crypto space, he has a motive to be as bullish as possible with his predictions.

It's actually a more nuanced way of explaining (breaking down) the importance of adoption/use. People always say that adoption relates to price appreciation, but fail to go further than that.

I can say the price has gone up to $14k because of an increase in demand, but what's that worth when you keep it at that? It would make sense to actually explain why the price has gone up, where the demand comes from, etc.

Coming back to the article, it's a long read but still somewhat hocus pocus to me. It can also be me as a simple being needing some catching up to do and widen my general field of interest.

I'm leaning more towards the contrarian view with how people continue to be bullish. I'm definitely not bearish, but seeing lower high after lower high makes me less comfortable.

Every lower high adds one more resistance level to break through. I get it that the general trend is still up, but we should be open to the other side of the story as well, which people here don't seem to like.

Positive for the bulls is that we had an extremely bullish weekly close yesterday. Now we have to wait and see what its impact is on the price and whether or not we can have a similarly bullish monthly close. Time will tell.

You're more referring to smart money. I definitely get it that it goes against the general idea that you should be the sole owner of your private keys, but when you're so wealthy in Bitcoin to dollar terms, it's different.

Smart money knows it isn't safe enough to hold all their Bitcoin themselves. They spread the risk by utilizing the storage service provided by an entity they trust, which in this case is Xapo.

Would you be comfortable with holding $100 million in Bitcoin yourself? Or would you be more comfortable knowing that you have a portion of it stored elsewhere? I probably would go for the latter to be honest.

I do agree about the drop gold commercial. It's quite controversial but then again, we can't complain about the media attention it generated for Bitcoin. It got a lot of gold bugs understandably really upset.

I'm actually quite happy that at least some of my family members are open minded and young enough to appreciate what Bitcoin is, but I'm still not sure if they are ready to distance themselves from the speculative nature of it.

Quite often after a sharp increase or decrease in the price they send me a DM through whatsapp asking why the price has gone up or down, and whether or not this is the time to long or short the market.

I'm uncomfortable providing them advice on the speculative nature of this market because when they lose, they'll blame me guaranteed. This is why I just tell them to hodl most of their coins and speculate only with a small portion.

What accelerated the fall of Bitcoin's dominance was that most altcoins had insane total coin supplies, while only a small portion of these altcoins were in circulation. Basic law of supply and demand then does the rest of the work.

I never liked the way market caps of coins are being calculated when it comes to tokens that have been printed out of thin air and of course the forks. It's impossible for Bitcoin not to lose market cap dominance.

I don't think we'll see a mega altcoin season again similar to the one in 2017, but I doubt that people have become more skeptical and wiser. Once altcoins start increasing harder than Bitcoin we'll see people lose their mind again.

It doesn't require much effort from the side of the government to introduce such laws. There will always be a larger group of the inhabitants that will then not deal with Bitcoin because they're too afraid of the consequences.

The government can choose to softly enforce these laws by jailing a few people left and right every now and then to signal that they are actively chasing after those who break the law. Pretty effective measure if you think about it.

It's probably more related to them wanting to create a 'friendly' crypto environment for their own Petro to thrive one day. It's not something we read a lot about nowadays, but it can't just have magically vanished.

We look at everything from a 'how much can I gain perspective', but that's not necessarily the case with investors using gold as a hedge. I think these comparisons are just used to stimulate the Bitcoin narrative.

I really thought that investors and people in general were sitting in gold for the gains, which some might, but the majority is happy when they can break even and therefore not lose as much as when they would have held fiat.

Gold has its own characteristics that make it unique, where Bitcoin is just something that has been here only a decade and hasn't actually booked much progress at all. It just grew in price.

What fundamental progress has there been? We've had SegWit that's being prevented from growing further in adoption by big blockers, and LN, which I like a lot, but isn't anywhere near being useable for the masses.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as that governments shouldn't be allowed to interfere with their business. Governments make the rules and they can break or bend them at any time if they so wish.

Shell in Nigeria is an example of how a large corporation abuses its power. The environmental impact of all the oil leaks is mind blowing. It's purely their money that stimulates the government there to not stop them.

I really wish the Nigerian government would step in and put a stop to it, but they need the money from Shell, and then we shouldn't forget the bribes that makes high ranked politicians look away.

If they really end up pushing KYC through our throats for even the most silly few buck amounts, then they will lose a lot of business. I can't see them remain operational under these circumstances.

People are already at a point where they develop a strong dislike towards BitPay. Another nasty push and people will stop using it and that will probably lead to merchants dropping them as payment gateway.

I get it that it isn't just BitPay being affected by this new regulation, but they will suffer the most due to their anti Bitcoin stance. Those who actually spend their coins aren't stupid enough to share their personal information with BitPay.

It's interesting to see that BitMEX still hasn't banned the IPs of countries they don't provide services to. It wouldn't really be a problem if account creation was disabled, but even that they still allow these people to do.

Sure, you can't deposit and therefore not trade, but you shouldn't allow these people to sign up if they can't use your service. You definitely don't need an account for live market data with tradingview already working fine.

With the pressure from the CFTC one would expect BitMEX to bullet proof their platform and stop being so arrogant. Arthur Hayes is a bit too calm given the pressing circumstances. Very suspicious.