Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[ImThour]

The amount of time we are taking on these levels which are below 200 WMA is what scares the shit out of me.

Low IQ Finds TA = Astrology.

FTFY.  As an inveterate pedant, I could not resist.

Not sure what you fixed in that but WMA means Weekly Moving Average and that's exactly what I meant.

[1714241487]

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[death_wish]

The amount of time we are taking on these levels which are below 200 WMA is what scares the shit out of me.

Low IQ Finds TA = Astrology.

FTFY.  As an inveterate pedant, I could not resist.

Not sure what you fixed in that but WMA means Weekly Moving Average and that's exactly what I meant.

I added the “W”.  You said “200 MA”.  It is a common mistake for newbies who don’t know the technical jargon.

Edited to add:  It is the 200-week moving average, not a weekly moving average if calculated on daily prices as it apparently is on most sites discussing the 200 WMA for Bitcoin.  That is an important distinction, but to elaborate here is otiose.

[death_wish]

The reason I reference this, is because most Bitcoiners and traders get it wrong. Most thought $30K wouldn't break, but as soon as it did, those people were all expecting ~$15K prcies.

Assuming most voting in this poll get it wrong (again); Bitcoin closes June above $20K, the industry has hit max pain already and we'll see $25K before $15K  

That’s just being blindly contrarian.  Also, you are leaving out a few crucial steps.  Pointed omissions.

After $30k broke, many people thought that $25k would hold.  After that broke, most people took the 200 WMA line as an article of faith.  Why did you omit that?

After Bitcoin broke 200 WMA and the 2017 cycle top (even in nominal dollar terms, not adjusted for inflation!), then the people who thought $30k would hold are talking about $15k, or even below.

For my part, this does not make me pessimistic about Bitcoin’s long-term future.  See my comparison to the history of the gold market.  I see Bitcoin as digital gold.  Even gold can suffer an extreme, extended bear market much worse than I expect here; so, too, could Bitcoin.  It is realistic to acknowledge that as a possibility, and not improbable as things now stand.

I do think we can declare TA dead.  Declare 200 WMA dead as a reliable Bitcoin Bottom.  We have gone into a deep crash below 200 WMA for longer than prior precedents, such as the March 2020 flash-crash caused by Covid panic; and we have too low for too long to compare prior precedents for hovering just under/around 200 WMA (August/September 2015, or the days following the Covid panic crash).

That’s better for Bitcoin, in the long run.  Let’s stop with the juju, and refocus on long-term value fundamentals.

The bottom could already be in, now.  Or not.  I don’t care:  Either way, I believe in Bitcoin for the long term.  And I do know that Hopium is a dangerous drug.  Nothing hurts like false hope!

Called it:

A. Bull traps.  Destroying long-term confidence in BTC needs not one big crash, but a series of fake recoveries followed by worse crashes, false hopes, broken dreams.  This is psychological warfare as much as economic warfare.  We now have memes about "Slaying of a Bearwhale", Honey Badger - a common belief that BTC always recovers and goes up.  Evil Hat wants to replace that with a popular belief that "what goes up, must come down".

Evil Hat(TM) wants to break all long-term uppitiness in Bitcoin, shatter all long-term trends, smash the 200 WMA line.  Ultimately, it wants to throw BTC into a death-spiral that only bottoms out when 10k BTC buys 2 pizzas again.

This cannot be done with one simple crash.  [...]

Maybe we will now turn around.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

I want to get out in front of any further potential crashes, expect the unexpected, and deprive the bears who hate Bitcoin of any more chances for “I told you so.”  OK, they were right that we broke 200 WMA and the 2017 cycle top.  So what?  If it goes to $15k, or $10k, or whatever, I still expect someday to see my million-dollar Bitcoins.  It may take longer than I previously expected; but I don’t care, because I already said that I am in it for the long term.  My expectation is based on long-term value fundamentals, not on lines on a chart.

If the bottom is already in, take it as a bonus.

If not, then holding BTC now is like holding gold when it crashed spectacularly a few decades.  So what?

It’s gold.  Buy and hold.

[death_wish]

Hello, $20k.

Yes, I will make about 20 posts in a row if it starts making new milestones like that.

Edit:  Damn it, Buddy.  The oracle price is just over $20k where I sit ($20,063).  Went as low as about $20,275 before it started to fall back...  Now $19,977 here.  Sigh, edit, edit.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[o_e_l_e_o]

Throwback to the last time we hit $20k.

Last time had much better memes.

[Wilhelm]

Aaaanddd it's gone 

[OgNasty]

Seems like the big boys are having trouble liquidating Celsius the way they want to. You can see all the middle of the night high volume dumps where someone was attempting to manipulate the markets downward. A lot of talk that it’s exchanges trying to force their own customers to be liquidated. This market’s goal seems to be to liquidate every single long and short until all the leveraged traders are wiped out.

[Wilhelm]

Seems like the big boys are having trouble liquidating Celsius the way they want to. You can see all the middle of the night high volume dumps where someone was attempting to manipulate the markets downward. A lot of talk that it’s exchanges trying to force their own customers to be liquidated. This market’s goal seems to be to liquidate every single long and short until all the leveraged traders are wiped out.

I heard Celsius is talking to banks and can probably defend their position now.
Liquidated positions for BTC and ETH are steadily dropping so everything is calming down.

[Richy_T]

Edit:  Damn it, Buddy.  The oracle price is just over $20k where I sit ($20,063).  Went as low as about $20,275 before it started to fall back...  Now $19,977 here.  Sigh, edit, edit.

CB only gives the spread at the last book retrieval. I've considered adding some more info in there too but haven't had the time recently to really think about options.

[death_wish]

When gold prices (in dollars) soared from 70s stagflation, then crashed, was it smart to sell the top?  OK, how do you know what the top is?

In gold’s extreme, extended bear market, after it started crashing, was it smart to sell at $800?  $700?  $600?  Selling for $600 and later re-buying for $300, you could have doubled your gold holding.

...$500?  $300?  $260?  Whoops!  Selling for ~$260 (IIRC^*) would have been mindrusting gold.

Holding gold is always safe, if your biggest concern is not to be stuck with less gold than you have already accumulated.

Holding BTC is always safe, if your biggest concern is not to be stuck with less BTC than you have right now.

^*  Numbers here are tossed off the top of my head to make a point.  If someone corrects any errors as Jay corrected my recollection of when Slaying the Bearwhale occurred, then... eh.  Here, at least, it will not change my point.

So you are saying investors should only accumulate gold or BTC to increase their portfolio? If you do not extract some profits from your gains and reinvest them in that same assets or something else then you are not an investor. You are more like a collector. Professional investors always circulate their money in the different asset classes. If you do not know what the bottom or upper limits are then follow the market sentiments.

If you think of yourself as an investor you must keep track of the market about what's going on. Many people think a bear market is a downside of our economy but wise investors knows this is their opportunity. You can get things with a high discount price in a bear market so buy when everyone is selling and start selling when everyone is buying. This is that simple if you do not know about price actions charts or fundamental analysis.

Semantic game, No True Scotsman, and an absurdity:  What you mean is that I am not a trader.  You are repudiating the whole concept of “buy and hold”.  (Also, you implicitly figure PnL in dollars—not in real money, i.e. BTC.  For my part, I sometimes spend BTC on investments to make more BTC.  Figuring PnL in a depreciating, perpetually devaluing currency is extremely stupid.)

You say “collector” as if there were something wrong with that.  It is funny, because I have called myself a “collector” in my own thoughts about investment strategies.  My explicit goal is to collect and to accumulate valuable things, and to keep them.

In stocks, would you call Warren Buffet “not an investor”?  Buffet is a damnfool about Bitcoin; he should stick to what he knows, and he does know stocks!  He is the most famous (and only most famous) investor who takes the extreme buy-and-hold approach to stocks.

I call the extreme buy-and-hold approach to investing:  If you buy something good, the best time to sell is never.  Selling is an admission that you made a bad call when you bought—either you bought too much of something that’s not good enough (so, reduce your exposure to it), or you bought something bad (get out! run away!).  It happens.  Nobody makes the right call on 100% of investment decisions.

Of course, it is not the only good approach.  But in my opinion, it is the only good approach that >99% of people can achieve.

For an examine of polar extremes (not to exclude the middle), see also:

The buy-and-hold strategy does not give a free lunch:  HODLers pay every day for their future wealth, in the time value of money.  HODL incurs opportunity costs.  HODL also embraces long-term fundamental risks; long-term risks are the cost of easily avoiding short-term risks on the irrationality of the markets.

[...]
This also relates to my thoughts on money at rest versus money in motion.

[...]

One way trades the time value of money for the safety of money at rest, and avoids short-term risks by depending on long-term fundamentals.  It requires the ability to buy BTC, and to avoid panic-selling.

The other way relies on keeping money in motion.  The requirements list is much higher.  The risks of failing to meet those requirements are extreme.

Take your pick!

For the record, for anyone interested in the postmortem of how I wrecked my own finances:  A major motive for me my fatal experiments with debt—a position that I explicitly called “shorting the dollar” at the time—was my desire to never sell anything, ever, except dollars which I love to sell.  Top priority:  Never spend BTC.  Lower priority:  Accumulate a basket of alts, without the ongoing necessity of trading back to BTC to take profits.  Collect more of everything—more, more, more of everything!—and use it all as the basis for (strategy not for public discussion) to generate dollar income paying down dollar debt as it depreciates.

“Buy appreciating assets with depreciating debt” is an excellent theory, which proved catastrophic in practice.  It would work, if I had (a) orders of magnitude higher capitalization to begin with, and (b) access to lending terms that are not insane for long-term debt.  Otherwise stated:  It would work, if I were Michael Saylor!  I am not Michael Saylor.  By crudely pretending that I was Saylor buying BTC with debt, I ruined myself financially.  Playing a children’s game of make-believe-I’m-Saylor with a cryptocurrency margin account is what got me dollhouse-sized finances.  Newbies, take heed:  You are also not Michael Saylor.

[Krubster]

I recommend putting a few coins on a lightning node and then throwing the SSD into a volcano.  That's what I did, and it puts things in perspective.

Yeah bro. Was very sad to learn about that.

So, total loss for that one node confirmed, or did it end up recovering after all?

Actually.. I am well on the way to recovering it all  (hope I did not just jinx it).  The CL node (jeed) was able to be restored from a backup created by the backup plugin right before the SSD went south.   Even our channel is back up and connected.

The LND node (deej) is still in limbo.  So I am using the seed+SCB restoration method.  What that does is scans through the whole blockchain from the birthday of the node (11/19) and that is taking forever.  But all the transactions are trickling in.  Once that is done the Static Channel Backup file is loaded and all the channels are just closed.

So the sad part is my older BOS ranked node is badly wounded.  BUT I am hopefull I will gather up all the funds on chain sometime today.

The question is... do I want to set channels back up on that thing?  Or throw the rPi into the volcano after moving all the corn back to cold storage.

For some reason (insanity?) a am considering  setting up a set of fewer but larger channels on the node and keeping it going...  

My version of titanium plates, I suppose.

I'm sorry to hear that. That explains why our channel force-closed. All your funds should be safe though. I suspect all your channels will get force-closed once the blockchain sync though.

Speaking of Lightning. I have invested in new hardware to start a new node. It's a NUC with Ryzen 5, 16 GB RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD. This time I'm running the node on Ubuntu 22.04 and Citadel.

The new node is actually up and running, but I'm waiting to close the channels and move the funds from my old node until I have physical access to it. It still needs some tinkering before I'm ready to make the move.

So far I have set up a hybrid mode, making my node accessible over both Tor and Clearnet. I've set up a VPN tunnel on a VPS, forwarding the lightning traffic to my node over Clearnet without revealing my IP. This guide was a lot of help doing so (I skipped the LNbits part).

It will be interesting to see if this new node will perform better than my old one, running over Clearnet.

@BobLawblaw, @cAPSLOCK, I will close our channel in the upcoming days, but I will open a new channel between us once I'm ready to make the move to the new node.

[death_wish]

Edit:  Damn it, Buddy.  The oracle price is just over $20k where I sit ($20,063).  Went as low as about $20,275 before it started to fall back...  Now $19,977 here.  Sigh, edit, edit.

CB only gives the spread at the last book retrieval. I've considered adding some more info in there too but haven't had the time recently to really think about options.

My primary desktop ticker is an oracle based on an average of two different price oracles.  The primary underlying oracle is, in turn, based on data feeds of Bitcoin pricing data from multiple price data publishers.  The underlying data is pretty sophisticated, and includes confidence intervals—very important, those confidence intervals!

I also have a CoinGecko ticker.  But by comparison, it is crude and very slow to update.  My primary ticker sometimes updates several times per second.

(Not naming names because this is all somewhere in altcoinland, in an environment I do not much trust.  Ping me if curious.  The primary oracle caused a cascade of wrongful liquidations by mispricing BTC at $5k in September 2021, due to a coincidence of simultaneous “errors” from two different price feed publishers who, due to “software bugs”, priced Bitcoin at exactly zero.  Zeroes severely drag down an average!  FWIW.)

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[Arriemoller]

Edit:  Damn it, Buddy.  The oracle price is just over $20k where I sit ($20,063).  Went as low as about $20,275 before it started to fall back...  Now $19,977 here.  Sigh, edit, edit.

CB only gives the spread at the last book retrieval. I've considered adding some more info in there too but haven't had the time recently to really think about options.

About CB, I only yesterday saw the avatar when reading the WO on a cumputer I wasn't logged in to (I have it on ignore), and I litterally LOLed, well done!

[matt4054]

Hello, $20k.

Enjoy your time with your buddy, he might have to leave again shortly... 

[death_wish]

OgNasty, I recall that sometime around late April or early May, you explicitly warned that there would probably soon be a series of bull traps and fake recoveries.  Not searching for the post now, but you deserve credit for that prediction.  Will find it sometime.  I thought of that many times, when we repeatedly recovered from the $20ks to as high as $32k—then, when we got back above 200 WMA—then...

Seems like the big boys are having trouble liquidating Celsius the way they want to. You can see all the middle of the night high volume dumps where someone was attempting to manipulate the markets downward.

I hope that they liquidate Celsius.  A custodial “we hold all the keys—trust us” scam which, by the evidence, apparently manipulated our market downward for months?^*  Please, bearwhales, destroy this monster with extreme prejudice!

I DGAF about people who lose money in Celsius, because “not your keys”.  Let it be a lesson.  At least UST and LUNA holders had the plausible illusion of a decentralized, trustless, permissionless system; that was a lie, but people who believed it are only the innocent victims of a scam.  Celsius is explicitly centralized and custodial:  “Give us your money, and we will, um, ‘somehow’ give you a BTC yield on BTC that seems too good to be true for the very large volume of BTC in our system.  Trust us.”

No mercy!  Kill it with fire!

A lot of talk that it’s exchanges trying to force their own customers to be liquidated.

I think it’s not improbable that they do that often.  Their perverse incentives make it implausible that they never do that.  Human nature, etc.  (Newbies buying BTC on margin, take heed!)

This market’s goal seems to be to liquidate every single long and short until all the leveraged traders are wiped out.

Now that I am out of debt (with drastic realized losses near total wipeout), I admit that it’s not bad for Bitcoin if the market does some housecleaning.

Who cares if we crash very badly for awhile.  Strong hands will later benefit from a more robust, more reliable Bitcoin market.

^* Yes, I admit a desire for revenge.  Why shouldn’t I?  If not for Celsius and a few others maliciously dragging BTC down, it is likely that I could have paid off my debt slowly—while never, ever selling any BTC.  They wrecked me; they cost me almost everything.  What goes around, comes around.  Condign retribution:  Foul up the BTC market, and you have nowhere left to stand when it’s trashed so badly that the ground suddenly falls out from under you.  If there is any justice in this, Celsius will be burnt to the ground—absolutely zeroed out.  If there is any justice.

[BTCaesar]

A nice pump! 
Hopefully then no dump anymore (enough is enough)… 

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[death_wish]

@ChartBuddy, I apologize for this:

FUCK YOU, BUDDY!  Fuck you, you actively malicious son of a bitch.  I hate you.

Buddy, you ain’t so bad.  I am sorry that I publicly cussed you and threatened to hack you/murder you, when I was reeling with shock from extreme catastrophic losses.  (Newbies take note:  Buying BTC on margin and/or borrowing against BTC collateral will drag you into an asset-destroying, money-eating, soul-sickening hell, from which you cannot even begin to emerge until the debt is repaid in full.)

You ain’t so bad, Buddy.  Well, maybe not.

In the future, I do reserve the right to insult you, threaten grievous harm to your robot self, etc. if I am in a foul mood, and/or if I think it’s funny and/or demonstrably didactic.

For instance, do you suppose that someone of my intelligence and public poise would make this post...

FUCK YOU, BUDDY!  Fuck you, you actively malicious son of a bitch.  I hate you.

...unless having made a conscious decision just to let it all out?

Hello, $20k.

Enjoy your time with your buddy, he might have to leave again shortly... 

Note that my thereby post was before Buddy’s.  And not deliberately timed to precede his.  I noticed $20k passed on my ticker, so posted the “Hello, $20k.”  It so happened that Buddy posted right after me, so I edited in an appropriate note.