In 2015 the price went 45% below the RP, in 2018 30% and in 2022 only 21% - so the market matures. Now with ETFs it's going to be even less. Current RP is is $56k and it's on the rise, so 6 months from now it's going to be $60k. Even if we were to hit the same correction as in 2022 and hit the bottom in 10 months, 20% below the RP, that would still be $50k, which means ~60%.
That's interesting. I didn't really bother too much about the realized price indicator, as it was a bit of a very theoretic concept for me. For example, it is distorted by Satoshi's coins and other "lost early miners' coins", and of course cannot take into account the vast majority of Bitcoin users (I would say 60-70%+) who hold all their coins on exchanges or custodial wallets.
But I guess it is distorted in the same way in all recent "cycles" (Satoshi's coins were present at all times, and from the MtGox era on most Bitcoiners unfortunately would hodl their coins at least partly on exchanges) so this observation may have some merit.
I feel like bitcoin is too small and too dependent on stocks and politics to have its own repeating pattern that cannot be changed. In fact it has been changing in all these previous "cycles" influenced by external factors.
Agree, I recently started a
whole thread about that, I would add other sources of the price movements outside of "stocks and politics" like Bitcoin exchange hacks, but the cycles for me can all be explained quite well. (I just saw you posted there, perhaps I'll answer soon.)
The most cyclic element I acknowledge are the sentiment changes. I think we can't deny there are phases where Bitcoin achieves a quite high attention span of the average population, and others where it doesn't. And it can also be explained quite well with mass psychology that these phases normally need some time to develop. Thus I think we will always have clear bear and bull markets of a length of at least several months each - just because in the bullish phase the general public needs time to pick up with attention, and in the bearish phase it takes a while to wane away.
But I question the striking influence of halvings on that pattern some people assume (due to the quantitatively limited relevance of miners as BTC sellers with far less than 1% of the daily supply), and thus I don't think the 4 year cycle is a "reality" (outside of coincidence and self-fullfilling prophecy).
The most bullish pattern for bitcoin is world peace, meaning the end of the conflict in Ukraine, no tariffs on China and the EU, and so on.
I think that still could be true, but in a less volatile future, Bitcoin could rival gold as a crisis hedge asset, as it "naturally" doesn't have such a strong correlation to the real economy compared to the stock market. A stock needs dividends or revenue growth to be able to increase in price, and that depends on real demand for the company's products i.e. sales. While Bitcoin also benefits from people having spare money to invest in it, the connection is much looser*, very similar to with gold. I think however this will only happen if enough potential investors convince themselves that Bitcoin can serve as a crisis hedge, and that the stock market correlation is not a law of nature (I believe it exists only because investors/traders still don't have a good independent fundamental Bitcoin price theory and thus "hang" on the stock market).
*Example: Bitcoin won't go "bankrupt" in an economic crisis. Any company can go bankrupt, which means that its stocks will then tend to 0.