For me, 70K-100K is a dead zone for two reasons. First, when a new ATH occurs, the FOMO will not allow just a 10%-20% ATH. Second, 100K is a psychological laser focus for many and hardly any hodler will be willing to sell below 100K, especially when we already have an ATH above 80K. So if we have a normal bull market we can expect an ATH above 100K. How far it will go depends on many factors. It is likely that traders will be even more cautious and instead of the previous 3.5x ATH over the old, we will have 1.5-2.5x ATH in the area between 115K and 170K. For me, 170K would be the ideal ATH given the current situation.

And the current situation, we must admit, remains extremely unpredictable. It is not yet clear whether the domino effect has ended and there will be no more bankrupt companies. The whole institutional offensive has yet to be restarted and companies that are not ponzis but real investors, like Microshares, to step up. I personally do not think that in 2 years something will change in this regard. Hopefully the price will keep oscilating between 20K and 40K. The other option of oscilating below 17K will be a complete disaster. In that case, many more investors will capitulate which could further delay the new ATH. This would be something new for Bitcoin and it looks the least probable prediction, but who knows! In any case the ballsy DCAing is the right choice.

Back home after inflamated gallbladder surgery. 5 black stones 1cm each! A lot of suffering in the last 2 weeks but the worst is behind me. The medical care is almost free in my country. I had to pay some minor expenses which will be covered by my life insurance. Btw, it is nice to see some shy recovery to 24K.  I don't expect a new ATH in the next 2-2.5 years, so there will be plenty of time to DCA at cheap prices. For this strategy it is of little importance if 17.5K was the bottom or not. If one is healthy and has a good job, this may be the last opportunity to buy a whole BTCitcoin. Don't miss it because of greed to time some new bottom which might come or not.

For the first time since I started investing in BTC I haven't looked at the price for more than 24h. And what a  surprise: the price has fallen from 22.3K to sub 20K again. Oh, well, watcha gonna do. Continue hodling and DCA-ing of course. It is both funny and sad that only 8 months ago I was planning to quit my job and get a completely new life. However, finding some kind of income and buying a real estate is harder than I thought. So, I decided to move to another better place and start a second job. In the next year I will keep the old job, but later if the travelling is too much for me, I will stick to the new job only. I don't want to give an impression that I am poor and this is kinda mcdonald's situation. The new job will compensate the lack of income from eth mining (farewell pow) and the more the bear market lasts the more BTC I will add to my stash.

It is still weird that the bear market is so prolonged and severe. I'm still wondering if 17.5K is the new 5800 in early 2018 or 3122 in late 2018. Like the tether sell off in 2018 was the main reason for the crash to 3122 and luna's crash to 17.5K, it is possible that another similar story to repeat and bring the prices below 17.5K. But apart from that, I can't see a reason to stay around 20K much longer and not 30K+. So, I will put the odd like this: 55% that 17.5K was the bottom and 45% it was not.

Congrats man, well deserved!

The simple answer for all remarks is that I just translated the bear market 2018-2020 with the 50-85% oscilations. This seems to me the most likely scenario, but it is equally possible not to go lower than 17.5K if that is you want to hear. However, the ponzi chain of known and unknown companies shorting tens of thousands BTC is something we didn't have before. And this should be kept in mind and not to be so sure about PlanB or similar simple demand-supply predictions.  

Finally, after 8 months of waiting we have a dead cat bounce! And all this because of the "good news" of some ponzis paying fiat debt and getting back their BTC collateral. Once again the market is irrational. These ponzis are specialized at coordinated BTC shorting to give the clients the proper yield in BTC. My guess is that they will wait for the cat to stall somewhere in the 26K-35K range, to resume the shorting.

The real question is will this bear market finish until the next halving or this time it will be different. I don't know how much BTC collateral all these ponzis have in total, but it seems enough to defend any short position even if there are not many BTC left on the spot exchanges. All this is of course just a speculation for the future, but it's been a 100% reality in the last 8 months. In this case the price will move something like this in the next 2.5 years: 17.5K->35K->20K->25K->15K (the last bottom might be around 12K or lower)->20K->30K->20K->42K. And then hopefully some good news will boost the next 2025 bull run to a brief last ATH in the 168K area (just a SOMA number like every other). This is the optimistic version. I don't want to speculate what will happen if these ponzis hold the price below the last ATH in 2025. It would be very dissapointing indeed.

NEW: Celsius has finished paying its loan to Maker DAO and got 21,962 WBTC (≈$440M) in collateral back
https://twitter.com/Blockworks_/status/1545015522332495873

In other words, Celsius will have back 22K BTC to short them and continue its ponzi scheme. It is not so hard to guess what was going on and why the market turned out to be bearish despite all the bullish news since Nov 2021. In USA SEC is closely watching the stonk market and nobody dares to try a new ponzi. But with BTCitcoin there was a new opportunity for 10+ companies. The first was Terra of course. They "invented" the financial perpetuum mobile of constant flow of funds usd->ust->terra->usd, which is a pure ponzi and crashed of course. Still it wasn't noticed neither by SEC nor by most of the "crypto analysts" until it exploded.

The remaining funds on the other hand invented a much more complicated inter company ponzi. The quick transfer of BTC made this possible. So, basically, company 1 gets both fiat and BTC with the promise of some yield. Then it gives to company 2 with the expectation of a higher yield. And so on. Since they all amassed over 100K BTC's (roughly estimated by me), they could easlly short BTC and give the yield in BTC. But this works only if the inflow of fiat continues. At one point it stopped, and many retail investors cashed out on a huge loss, especially the Canadian Purpose ETF. And like the domino effect, they started looking for fiat loans to pay the debt and to resume BTC shorting. For how long this will continue, I can't tell. May be in USA SEC will bust them and then the real bull run will start. Until some asian companies figure out the same model and bring havoc again. Hopefully by then the price would be way above 100K.

This bear market is different and even more unpredictable than usual. For the moment it looks like any 5% increase is followed by a 15% drop. Nothing has changed since the last ATH. And this can only be explained by a massive BTCictoin spending as collateral to avoid liquidation and insolvency. Nobody knows if in the next days another fund will explode with 10K+ BTCitcoins on fire sell. For that reason most of the investors either lost interest or wait at the sidelines for the dust to settle. The so called institutional investors are hard to attract and even harder to keep when the price is 50%+ below their purchase price. Even if there is a disbelief rally to 35K+ in the coming weeks, the remaining institutional investors will sell at break even and some of the hodlers will sell something, knowing that a revisit to 20K is to be expected. If the pattern of the previous cycles is kept, the average price will gradually increase to 3x from the bottom until the end of 2024. Examples: 10K->30K, 15K->45K, 17.5->52.5K. And if there is a new ATH in 2025, it might be around only 2x from the last, i.e. 140K. This is what I think, but I might be awfully wrong in both directions, like sub 10K bottom and no new ATH in 2025, or the other extreme - a new ATH beyond 300K.

Well, no recovery is in sight as the big companies are selling their BTCitcoins to avoid liquidation. May be this will stop soonish and the price will start to climb up again. By soonish I mean the end of the year. So it is wise to keep some fiat in case there is another 50% down from here. Nobody wants Vegeta memes again, but if we have to go through this pain again, at least we can keep some fiat and buy all the way down.

I beg to differ. The definition of a weak hand is someone who bought higher and sold lower.  Look at all those liquidations and institutions selling to get back 20-30% of their investment. They are crying, not us! The strong hands never do that. Why should we complain? We always sell on a 10x+ profit and in case we don't need some fiat, we reinvest buying lower. And those who don't sell anything are the toughest and their reward will be the greatest!

DB] FTX walked away from a deal with Celsius after seeing state of its finances: The Block
https://twitter.com/tier10k/status/1542495071685206022?t=OQcH3jAlO4mt6HQVbAl2pA&s=07&fbclid=IwAR0hFacO38O_d1FlcE8TmpaXabGzSjxYRK5Y9T4d9zSLO-PHhVmROhcVGsk

This bear market looks infinite. Every day some company with 15K+ BTCitcoins gets liquidated and obviously all these BTCitcoins getting dumped on the spot market. BlockFi, 3AC, etc. ponzis were hoping SEC will approve Greyscale ETF so that these 640K BTCitcoins to be dumped at 20K instead of 13K. Thanks to the bankers' sock puppet Gary Gensler, this didn't happen. When will this end and what will be the price then? What if this continues another 6 months, 1 year, or even 3 years? This will be serious. We've never had so severe bear market for 8 straight months. May be it will end soon, may be not. I expect more tears and pain for the weak hands to come. On the other hand, this may be the last chance for the strong hands with a regular income to buy several whole coins in the next few years. As it is said in Psalm 126:5 "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy." This is too important chance to be ignored. A chance to have a new house and to retire early. I missed it in the last bull run, but now I have a chance to recover 70-100% of my previous position and redo it properly above 100K.

For me the most secure exchange is kraken. The best in terms of fees is Coinbase - for withdrawal it is almost 0 fee. The worst exchange without any doubt is Bitstamp. The fee is enourmous 0.005BTC. And each week they send me new emails asking insane things, to prove the origin of my bitcoins and fiat, by sending bank and credit card statements, pool statistics, and many other things. I stopped using this hilarious exchange several months ago.

If we analyze the previous two cycles, we will see something that is omitted as insignificant, but important in my opinion. In the bear market 2014-2016, although the price often returned to 200-ish, it is noticeable that the average price rose on an annual basis: 200-400-600. Price 600-750 at the beginning of the bull market is over 3x compared to the bottom 200.

Something similar happened in 2018-2020. The average price rose from 3,100 to 10K along the halving. This is again 3x +. All this is a reflection of the increase in demand, which is shown by the statistics for the new addresses. What was different this time, was that we had a flat peak for months, which was repeated at even higher levels. This is a strong sign that this price will be reached again in the near future. I say this because before there were voices that 20K is an unattainable price, the fruit of some FOMO, which will not happen again. Now things are even safer than before in this regard.

My explanation for the flat peak and the big dips is the following. In the years before 2021, there was only talk of institutions entering the spot market, not just derivatives. It turned out that they were imperceptibly preparing and all at once entered the market. Only the hedge funds that have bought bitcoins are over 1300 as I read somewhere! Many of these companies have bought over 10K bitcoins. And this is too fast depletion of liquidity in the market. Paradoxically, this did not lead to the expected sharp top above 100K.

There were many reasons for this: the elon musk tweets, the panic in Asian markets over the Chinese ban, but mostly the collapse of some projects that were de facto ponzis or had improper collateral and coudln't support the yield. It turned out that these institutions are investors who view bitcoin as the stocks. They do not expect more than 20% profit or loss. That's why they sell, mostly at a loss. Only the Canadian Purpose ETF, for example, bought over 50K bitcoins at a price above 55K and sold half of them at a price of 17.5K-20K.

In this sense, it turned out that the retail investors behind the institutions are the weakest possible hands. This is logical since if someone can't buy and hodl bitcoins in cold storage then he is not educated enough and hence doesn't have the needed will power. This leads to bankruptcies and sell-offs, which unfortunately have not yet ended. This whole fiasco changed the normal course of the cycles, but not completely. I expect more educated investors to gradually enter through the institutions that will follow the example of Michael Sailor, looking at least 4-5 years ahead.

No matter what the price will be before the next halving, investors who will show character and will not sell anything below 100K will prevail. On the other hand, no one will have any illusions anymore and will most likely sell some quantity between 100K and 200K in anticipation of a 50% + drop. So the most likely top will be in my opinion in this range. But there is a theoretical possibility that there will be no new ATH, if things with the institutions turn out to be much worse than we think (like Greyscale going bankrupt), or the other extreme - to go way over 200K and compensate for the lack of a sharp top in the previous cycle. In my opinion, this can only happen with the appearance of significant news around the normal peak, as happened in 2017.

Goldman Sachs Leading Investor Group to Buy Celsius Assets: Sources
The Wall Street firm is seeking $2 billion in commitments from investors to buy distressed assets at steep discounts if the crypto lender goes bankrupt.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/24/goldman-sachs-raising-funds-to-buy-celsius-assets-sources/

Let's be fair to mindrust though. He sold in panic and disappointment at the price he had bought. Although he was not overexposed as he claimed - 2 to 1 in favor of fiat is anything but overexposed. Many of us are 100% in favor of bitcoin in terms of savings. I personally had exhausted the credit card limits and had taken a loan from the bank with which I had bought the day before at 7K. If I wasn't afraid of covid, I swear, I would go the next day and take out a 5x bigger loan and buy bitcoins for 4K. Whatever.

But in the last year we have seen something even more unfortunate, not to say ridiculous. We see an influx of institutions, thousands of them, who have invested in bitcoin and even more companies and retail behind them. However, over 90% of them have no knowledge, no beliefs, no intention to hold for at least 4 years. Some of them were quite influenced by the tweets of elon musk, which shows what their intellectual level was. That is why these crashes last year and this year turned out to be so big. All these companies and retail lost over 50% of their money. And this can be easily checked on the glassnode website. What I noticed, for example, I see today that many others have noticed on Twitter. From the Canadian purpose ETF were withdrawn 24K bitcoins at the end of Friday (50% of the bitcoins). It is almost certain that this is a company that has found a way to sell them on the exchange the next day. Something that caused the big crash.

So, several large companies have practically gone bankrupt, and others are moving in that direction. Probably over 90% of the companies. There, in addition to the fact that customers want an annual interest rate, contracts are often made, in case the price falls to a certain level, the asset to be sold immediately. This is de facto a long position with a margin call. Michael Sailor did something similar, but there the calculations are better and even at 3K he is not in danger of liquidation. Not to mention the companies that use bitcoins as collateral for their collapsed shitcoins.

What follows from now on? This process of exodus of the institutions and the weak hands will probably continue for another 2-3 years at least. But even afther that, we clearly cannot rely on them for sustainable price growth. In addition, until the very end of 2020, despite the withdrawal of 650K bitcoins from Greyscale from the market, the price could not pass 10K due to the ugly Bart manipulations on 20x+ derivatives exchanges such as Bitmex. The paypal sensation had to appear before the bull market could start. Assuming that the ETF will be given to Greyscale within 3 years, this means that these bitcoins will return to the exchanges. And if there is no sensational news like PayPal, there may not even be a significant bullish market despite the halving.

So, let's hope that the ETF will not be given and the institutions will not inflate the price and then bring it down. What is sure to happen is that the convinced hodlers will continue to increase their stash and will not sell on a loss.

Remember how during the spectacular bull run from 10K to 40K, with no correction, we all thought "This time it is different. Big institutions are buying and they will never sell on a loss, hence there will be no major correction." Hahaha, how delusional! Now, practically every hedge fund and company which uses loans with liquidation options are selling on a huge loss, as if we are having an asset which is dead and will never  recover. What about the famous ETFs? Purpose ETF for example is now having 618M in Bitcoins, 781M less than on 16.06 and 1.6B less that the peak.

I thought ETFs don't work during weekends, but from https://www.coinglass.com/etf it is evident that these bitcoins were withdrawn on 18.06. May be they participated in the historic crash below 20K. So, all these hopes for institutional adoption now appear to be false. The institutions are way more vulnerable to crashes than the veteran hodlers. So, we have to look upon them as extremely weak hands. Michael Saylor is right of course, but to think that these problems will be solved soon is pure hopium. Who will force Binance, Bitfinex or any other non US exchange to ban leverage 20x? And when the foolish people will stop giving their money to companies with big promises? I think the answer to all these questions is never!

So, if SEC gives approval for a spot ETF, this may lead to buy the rumor sell the news event. Soon after the ETF starts, more dumping will follow, especially if it is GBTC, where almost all coins were bought in the 10-20K range. I really hope that the situation for the next halving cycle be better, so we can reach and break 100K mark. But I don't expect the FOMO to last long enough to stay in the 100K-200K range. Of course, it is too early to tell, but I plan to sell something in that range, so in case of another 50%+ crash to buy back my coins and remain with half of the fiat profit. Hopefully, I will do better job this time. At least I bought back the coins that I spent with the intention to buy a house, which didn't happen. And I could sacrifice a little bit more of my retirement savings to buy back a few more coins if we drop below 17K.

I was quite condident that we are near the bottom. But this morning I've read carefully the thread about blockfi https://twitter.com/otteroooo/status/1537497403246268416. If I had any illusions that all is good and BTCitcoin will recover soon, they all evaporated. I'm starting to think that the current price is miraculously high given the circumstances. It seems that all this mass adoption and institutions getting on board in the last years is just a bunch of giant ponzis falling apart before our eyes. This is too bad not only short-term but mid-term as well.

Just one sad detail which describes the current situation. Blockfi was hoping for GBTC to convert to ETF so they could withdraw thousands BTCitcoins and sell them without the 30% discount, i. e. at the real prices. In other words, we hoped for a spot ETF to attract new investors, but instead those 640K BTCictoins would be dumped immediately after the conversion! So, instead of bullish news this turns out to be a major bearish news. Now, for the first time I want SEC to keep denying those ETF's. And if one month of panic caused this crash to 17K, I can't imagine what will be the price after 6 months, when all these ponzis became insolvent and the investors get only 1-10% of their investment. This is a major blow to BTCitcoin, and I'm starting to think that the price may fall below 15K or, God forbid, below 10K. Anyway, I'm not selling, only buying all the way down. This is really heartbreaking, and the prospect of having more coins than before doesn't make me so happy as I thought.  Let's hope that the worst is behind us and the market will survive the liquidations to come.

I've just bought 0.27BTC.  Thanks weak hands and thanks Revolut for working 24/7

Not a cat bounce? Not even a tiny V shape jump from the bottom? This is looking bad for the 20x longs. There are 3 options:

1. Going below 20K for a few hours, say to 18-19K, and then V shape recovery 20%+ and possibly a new short-term bull run to 40K.
2. Going below 20K for a longer period, say to 15K and then the V shape recovery 20%+ which starts a new short-term bull run to 30K.
3. Going steady up without a dip under 20K and longs realizing profit. Now, this is something I've never seen so far. May be there is a theoretical chance for that, but this would be new. Since someone said that in 2018 crash to 3100 there was no V-recovery, I beg to differ. I remember clearly that the price was falling to 3120 until it jumped and reached 4200 in a week, which is almost 40%. And 40% now will lead us to 28K, which I don't see happening. And earlier in 2018, when the price fell for the first time to 6K, which is 70% from the top, in 2 weeks it almost doubled to 11.5K.

Therefore, the probabilities I would give are:
1. 50%
2. 45%
3. 5%

Edit. Literally 1s after I postied this the price fell below 20K. Let's see how it develops from now.

How BTCitcoin price is looking now: