What you are implying is that the forex market for other currencies will drop by the same percentage as the btc price disparity between foreign currencies and USD. Otherwise, FX arbitrage would raise the price.

I wouldn't say there's nothing to support the rise: There are several things to support the rise:
1. Segwit, and other scaling projects.
2. A robust decentralized exchange ecosystem of dozens of exchanges included licensed exchanges and exchanges backed by banks.
3. World events.
4. 3 years without a new ATH. The price needed to stop and take a break to actually grow in value and fill in the chart, and now plenty of time for that to occur has passed.
5. TA.
6. The halving

If you search for a survey-generated voting guide, this is one the first results. I'm not sure how many people it reaches. I was just amazed that Bitcoin is somehow an issue in the election and that it is assumed that a layman survey user knows what it is.

I see a few potential drops:
1. A drop from $685 to $650
2. A drop from $750 to $685
3. A drop from $1050 to $800
4. A drop from $5000 to $1800

Whenever I look at the coindesk news listing, all 20 titles say "something something Blockchain something something Bank". I'ts sickening.

It's going up because it broke a triangle and people expect a rally past ATH.

There isn't really a correlation between Bitcoin and any other world events or markets. Any time it has occured in the past is because speculators and traders deduced or claimed such a connection on their own. Bitcoin is way too small and unweildy to be used for any kind of capital flight. Of course the USD price of bitcoin, however, will have minor deviations in its trend to adjust the forex value of the dollar measured by the US dollar index - arbitrage will ensure that.

This is no fun without a Bitcoinity full of walls somewhere to look at.

At a time like this where the market has been essentially flat for months, your decision on whether to buy really boils down to whether or not you have confidence in Bitcoin or not. With this much stability, there is no way to predict with TA what way the market is going to move. You can't say there is going to be some imminent retracement of the large move that just happened because there wasn't one.

Here are a few reasons why you might buy or use Bitcoin:

1) You think a rise in bitcoin adoption is around the corner or will inevitably come.
2) You are a trader looking at a chart and you analyze that a move upwards is imminent, at which point you will sell for a profit.
3) You are a doomsday prepper who thinks fiat money will collapse but bitcoin will still hold value and be usable.
4) You aren't prepping for doomsday but still think fiat money will slowly inflate while bitcoin doesnt and you dont have particular confidence in any other investments.
5) You are a nerd and Bitcoin is the only investment you really know anything about the fundamentals of, and don't want to bother with anything else. Your pride doesn't let you hold less than X% of bitcoins and being part of the bitcoin elite.
6) You are afraid of the government freezing your money.
7) You are running a criminal enterprise, evading taxes, or using the black market.
8.) You hold bitcoins in order to trade altcoins or gamble. You get a double benefit of investing in bitcoin while also making profits of your trades. There are some services that even do forex or stocks instead of altcoins.
9) You made a lot of bitcoins trading in 2013, already cashed out a decent profit, and are committed to riding on a percentage of the profits permanently. (me)

The price is stable because the Bitcoin ecosystem is now dozens of small exchanges instead of a few large exchanges that control the price. All that Chinese crap with 1,000,000 volume per day is obviously fake.

Sometimes the news events in themselves don't warrant a particular move but they cause a movement just large enough to act as a catalyst for traders to think that some indicators have crossed and it's time for the next big move out of a coiled up area. The move then spikes media attention, and a chain reaction occurs.

I remember when Bitcoin had regularly scheduled rallies of 1000% for no particular reason at all other than that was the trend.

I do not understand why we even still have exchanges. Everything could be handled with a usdt/btc pair on a blockchain , with an exception of an entry point where you buy the tethers and immediately withdraw them.

I'm going to guess that the way Bitfinex has handled the debt is illegal on multiple levels and they are going to be hearing from the likes of CFTC again. You don't see anything like this happening in the real world.

I came back just to claim my lumen which was really stupid because a lumen is priced at 0.00000273 BTC so I risked exposing all my coins and getting distracted by the market to make a 0.000273% profit.

Anyway, it looks like I can safely ignore the market for another 3 months at least.

I think holding my coins for the past 2 years and continuing to hold them is pretty convicted. I don't know what else you're asking me to do other than scrounge up some spare fiat or do dangerous leveraged trading on a failing platform. That is folly and removes all of the technical advantages of holding bitcoin. If I really want to be a daytrader I can do it with other instruments on a regulated platform. On top of that, if you really wanted to go balls-to-the-wall, today you would have done that in GBP/USD and not BTC/USD. You could have made 1000% in single trade in a few hours with standard US leverage.

In that entire drop, bfx longs never went below $30M and now it is back to $42M

The short term rally is over. When you break through the lower 1D MA and return to nearly the starting point, the rally is over. The upwards momentum you are seeing now is due to brexit, which saw the GBP drop 15% and gold rise 6% over the past few hours.

I'm afraid I can no longer trade here anymore due to the issues at Bitfinex. I could lose my whole account if the site goes down while I'm on the wrong side of a leveraged trade (especially if its ETH). Hodling on-chain is a much better proposition and guaranteed to hold some kind of value. Since I'm already at the minimum amount of coins that I'm allowed to hold in a pact that I made with myself in 2013, I have no choice but to

HODL

see you next year (if there's somewhere to trade).