Jeez, what happened? Such a page crash I've never seen in WO before! Several hudred pages I think. Are we under a hacker attack? Are all old posts SAFU?

Since there is nothing interesting happening rn, I would like to recall the most amazing predictions ever made about the near future of Bitcoin. The year was 2015, the price was around $200 and a guy on reddit posted this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2y97hl/the_next_bubble_the_10k_25k_one_will_be_epic_and/?sort=new

It is as if he had a crystall ball. The price developed precisely the way he predicted it. Although he expected a top 25K and crash to 2K at the end of 2016, this was not far from what happened in 2017. Check out the comments below. Practically everyone behaved like a troll dissing his arguments.  Here are some of them:

----------
most coins on exchanges are just buy and sold after a 10% rise. Yes a huge buy order can kill the bots and start a rally, but at 2000 Eur everyone will be dumping like there's no tomorrow. btc is not like a stock, it's issued daily, hourly! that's a few millions per day.

The rise to $1200 was probably due to a highly illiquid market and dysfunction at mtgox.

Higher valuation leads to higher money supply in purchasing power terms. The current 3600 new BTC mined per day will need to be matched by demand at the higher valuation. I suspect things will get more interesting after a couple more reward halvings, at which time the annual BTC inflation rate will be very much lower than currently.

"the next bubble is virtually assured at this point" No it's not.

"We saw the bottom come in at $150" We have no idea if that was the bottom.

" end of the latest bear run." No one knows that.

"exponential expansion" Speculation.

"$2000, $4000.... $5000, $7000. "

"We may get all the way to $28k before the major correction"

"The next bitcoin bubble (due before the end of 2016)" Sure it is.

10k per bitcoin? such lol. Never going to happen dude. And I'm a Bitcoiner all through.

$300 this year would be a stretch.

Not going to happen. The big wave of new users are going to be poor people, who have to buy satoshi's worth of bitcoin. They are going to push the price up slowly. I think it will take over 20 years.
The price is far more likely to go below $100 than ever hit the numbers you mention.

Do you have any idea about the downward pressure on the price today, and how much stronger that pressure becomes tomorrow?

Sorry but I don't ever see another bubble in Bitcoins future. If the price is bound to go up like you say, then it will do so ever so slowly like we're seeing now

-------------

A similar prediction can be made today if we just multiply the numbers by 10. May be the year won't be 2022 but 2023 or 2024 and the top 180K instead of 250K. The general principles of the mass adoption are still valid. There is nothing exceptional about the last ATH at $20K, so it is highly probable that it will be significantly improved in the next years. I have to admit that I give little chances for $100K in the next 2-3 years, because of the current situation. But it is better to be prepared for such a scenario and not getting overly excited at prices $40K-50K and sell everything. This guy predicted also that everyone will expect the bull run to end below 5K, but the opposite will happen. Yeah, a lot of food for thought... I personally may sell up to 66% of my stash at this range $40K-50K but with the option either to buy back lower or to buy a real estate in a prestige sea resort. It depends on the time. My main motivation for hodling is this purchase, so I won't be sad if I will miss bigger profits in a more distant future. Besides, the possible profit of some future sell of that estate would be between 3x and 5x depending on the deal I make. But that's for me. For most hodlers, it is better to sell a smaller part of their stash. And of course, to plan a boating trip before the main sell

You do realize that one can draw at least 20 other lines connecting various tops/bottoms, showing absolutely all possible directions of the future prices, right?   And then, why should Bitcoin obey the one you chose?  (Of course, this is kind of a joke with much truth in it, valid for any TA in general.)

Having said that, there are some patterns that are remarkable and studied in the professional TA. Perhaps the most famous is the falling wedge pattern. It is clear that since the spike above 10200, we have a falling wedge. Your lines somehow miss this pattern. I don't understand how arbitrary lines should be preferred compared to the most common pattern in trading history. Anyway, the TA regarding the next move of the price pretty much is clueless. Half of the books/artciles predict a downard breakout and the other half an upward breakout. The only thing both agree is that the volume will be much higher. The other thing I partially agree with, is that it depends on whether we are in a bear or a bull market. If we are in a bull market started in March 12th and that will continue in the months and years to come, then the breakout should be upwards. It is almost equally possible however, that we are still in a longer bear market since July 2019 (or should I say since Jan 2018 with an interruption April-June 2019), so a breakout downards is equally possible.

Another day, another bart, meh... I voted for August as well. We stayed at $9200 for too long, let's hope we will see some action in the right direction in July.

I can relate to that. When I decided to go full in Sept 2017, I realized the risk that I try to catch a train at the last station from where it won't go any further. But I took the risk and don't regret about my choice. I think it is obvious that the exponential growth from below $1 to 20K$ in 8 years is not possible to be repeated in our lifetime. Back then even one buyer with several hundred bucks could drive the price up by 10%. Honestly, I find the expectations for future growth, by comparing to the previous peaks, ridiculous. Including Plan B, C or whatever. I think that in the years to come, we can realistically expect a new ATH between $40K and $50K. It is still possible to have a peak above 100K, but it would be brief. For prices in $300K-400K area we should probably wait another 4-5 years. Overall, if anyone entered like me at prices around $4-5K, in 8 years the profit would probably be like 100x, compared to > 20 000x for the same time interval 2009-2017. Of course, itt is still a very good profit to live with. The problem is that Bitcoin can do anything else with the same probability in the years to come. Nothing is guaranteed. Probably the best idea is to cash out something on the way up as an insurance of another long bear market.

I meant vegetta memes. 

Please, don't. I am sick of it.

I think it is obvious that anyone  used to direct buys/sells on exchanges or OTC won't be lured to sell on paypal. It is by no means safer. But this will offer a simple exposure to Bitcoin for the average Joe who is using paypal anyway and doesn't know a thing about Coinbase or Bitstamp. Moreover, iranians, chinese, indians, etc. are trying to avoid the ban of the crypto exchanges in their countries by using paypal and localbitcoins. The problem is that localbitcoins trades are of incredibly small volume.  Even in some European countries like Bulgaria all crypto exchanges are banned from most of the banks. Paypal is not banned and never will be. In this sense I said this is another level of mass adoption. Not that I care about the current pump or what traders/fudsters think.

How this would force us to sell our bitcoins? I don't understand. Please, elaborate.

I'm really excited by this news. 325 million users is a big number! In comparison, Coinbase has 30 mil accounts. This is huge indeed! It is better than ETF, which would give too much power into the hands of the institutions. While 325 mil potential buyers is another level of mass adoption.  Think about all those people who are banned from exchanges or just don't know about them - they can use paypal now to buy/sell and withdraw directly to their bank accounts or credit cards. It took me over a year to study the safety of the various exchanges before I started buying on them. During that time I used paypal and localbitcoins. In this situations are tens of millions worldwide. I know from my conversations with young people, that they are confused  how to buy and store bitcoins. At the same time almost everyone uses paypal. And paypal will profit from it too, since many asians will open accounts to avoid the ban in their countries.

P.S. It seems to me that the last pump started minutes after the article appeared on coindesk. May be some traders are starting to realize the significance of this news. Even while I am writing this, the price increased with another $100.  

Warning:

BTC reserves held on exchanges continue to decrease. For the last 2 days over 80K BTC were withdrawn from all exchanges. This sideways lingering continued long enough. We are getting to the point where the upward explosion will be unstoppable. The rocket is fueled and ready to launch, overcoming the gravity of the miniscule daily profit seekers. Traders, think twice before hitting the sell button with a 0.9% profit!

A very interesting story!

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-Bitcoin-millionarie

This guy has my respect! He waited 7 years as a true hodler. He didn't sell everything, he left over 50% of his stash. He sold far from the top at 11K and still didn't buy at higher prices during December 2017 FOMO. We can learn a lot from this guy. Screw the ferraries and lambos though, I think this is a horrible investment (despite my hat).

I just bought BTC for $500 at $9360 following my DCA. This whale buy clearly stopped today's dump   Just like Tom Hanks: boom!

mindrust, you allowed your assumptions to make you lose your trust in Bitcoin. You assumed too many things - Covid19=Armageddon, all hodlers dump their stash and finally tether is a scam used by Bitfinex owners to pump the price of Bitcoin, thus the only reason for its price increase. In reallity none of the above assumptions are true. On 12th March the dump was one of the worst in Bitcoin history but nonetheless not related to the market development. Whether a greater number of holders cashed out to make a living, or manipulators in Bitmex, or both I don't know. But I really don't think many hodlers sold on a loss or a break even price. The percentage of coins not moved over a year remained pretty high - over 60%. It is sad that one of our WO brothers left without a profit. From now on this dump will be officially remembered in WO as the "mindrust dump".

And lastly, about the tether and many others stable coins (and there are litterally tens of them right now). There may be more tethers than USD deposited in tether banks, but to claim that tether owners used them to pump the price in Bitfinex has no grounds. For the last year Bitfinex always trails behind with the lowest volume from all big exchanges. There wasn't a single pump to start there. Stable coins are actually being bought by many for various reasons - easier transfers, avoiding taxes and bans in some countries like China, etc. This is the main thing. You can see from the chart below that many purchases of tether (the same applies for the rest stable coins) were made during the mindrust dump in order to buy bitcoins on these low prices. Clever people buy during crashes and not sell! They know the fear will go away in a few days and then they will be on great profits.



With that regard, it doesn't matter if you are over- or under-invested in Bitcoin. Until you restore your belief in the fundamentals and learn to ignore the non existent threats, you won't be able to make a significant profit. I don't know if we will see 100K in the next 5-10 years, but I believe it is quite possible. Just try to imagine how will you feel then with a profit $1000, while it could have been $1 000 000. The misery will be double, because it won't be the tether which will bring us there, but the fundamentals.

I doubt that using paper wallets (PW) is safer than hardware wallets (HW). There are two exceptions, though. Neither is fool proof and forgetting your seed or giving to some program is equal to a disaster. The second exception is the problem detected for Trezor which was solved with additional passphrase.

When you generate the seed on HW it is seen only on the device. No internet, no theoretical possibility of someone seeing it. You have to write it  on paper, not by making pictures. Then you can memorize the 24 words and put in safe location just in case your memory fails. When you make transactions you need to press the button of the device which is both safe and easier than using other softare.  Moreover, HW display shows the address you are sending the coins. There are trojans which can detect a BTC address in the clipboard and then replace it with the hacker's address, so you may think you paste the right address. The creation of wallets on computers, using of printers, etc.  is potentially a risk if they fall into hacker's hands. Using the phone to take the picture of your paper seed and paste it in the app is also a risk. The pics may be uploaded in the cloud, etc. Typing your seed on a computer also is a risk of course. You never know what the trojans are capable of. There are hundreds of other risks related to router hacks, etc. I really don't see how one can claim paper wallets are 100% safe.

Earlier today we had some not well coordinated attempt to dump the price at $9600 at Coinbase with 900BTC. Later the attempt resumed followed by some more dumping to $9100. This all looks artificial to me. It is either a small whale cashing out to buy a yacht, or to reverse the trend in hope of buying more under 10K. Some people tend to get crazy when they see the price 10K, as if it is 100K or even 1 mil. And they forget that in the sea there are always bigger fish and many more smaller that will eat them for breakfast. Anyway, we are back into the game $9360 and rising. Go, Bitcoin, go! Slay the bears!