Look folks, just put all background noise about tether, India guv, Roubini FUD and other distractions out of your minds.
Here's what's going on. The correction is technical, pure and simple.
If you checkout this chart from 2015/2016/17, you can see that bitcoin grows in these 8-monthly bubbles which burst in the "propellor correction" fashion I described. The pattern's always the same:
That is:
• market starts rising out of a bowl
• gets to a point where it overheats
• nosedives sharply all the way down to retest just below the previous "propellor spike"
• retraces halfway up the initial correction and stabilises
• drifts slowly down from there to settle from where it starts the next cycle
During 2017 these corrections got closer together as we've had both greater market depth AND unprecedented growth during the year. So instead of our 8-monthly crash and recovery we've had 3 of those consolidations (that manifest in the lowest resolution weekly chart) in the last 6 months instead of 1. The last one was in November, peaking at $7500. Together, those 3 consolidations amounted to an aggregate 77% retrace spanning 6-8 months. ($7500, November, $1825 end May).
What this means according to precedent is that we NEED to retest at least that 7500 (+or- 20%) region before progressing. It's just the bitcoin way. This is an uncapitalised asset class that's rapidly capitalising and there's so much clamour to get in that it can't do it smoothly.
The low of $8455 we saw on Bitstamp a couple of hours ago may or may not be the bottom of the wick. To complete the full depth of the needed correction we may have to revisit the $7500 level or even 6k at a pinch to really bake in the last runup but that could just as easily manifest as a momentary panic "fat finger" dump before retracing back up the decline to around the $13k level which is 50% of the consolidation we've had since the peak.
How Does this Compare to the 2013 bubble ?In fact the 2013 rally and that nightmare 18 month recovery followed exactly the same pattern. The reason it took so long to recover is because it went
straight from $126 all the way to the top in 7 straight weeks without any of these bubble-bursting corrections on the way (or even mini corrections). That meant that the last support level was the so called "Cyprus spike" way back in April 2013 when it spiked at $266. And sure enough - according to form - it went all the way back to retest that level and a bit more for good measure. Note this is very different to the situation we have now on 3 counts:
1. the rise from $1000 to $19k (16k realistically) is comparable in relative terms but has taken a whole year instead of just 7 weeks
2. we have 3 fairly hefty consolidations which more or less overlap each other and we've almost arrived at the last of those already
3. the correction is rapid and deep which is a good sign because it snaps the market quickly back into a more reasonable trend that can be sustained (see previous "propellor corrections how they've played out).
Note: the angle between the support level and the 3 retracement lines in the 2013 chart below. You can see from that that the closer the retracement occurs to the peak blow-off, the higher the bottom will be. 2014 went low because it retraced so slowly and didn't hit the fan-line for a whole year.
Conclusion is, this means the bottom will be in fairly quickly and it's likely to be in the region of the $7500 level +/- 20% in my opinion followed by a fairly rapid (21 day) retrace to the upside as shorts close and off-book demand goes back onto the order books. If not, there are still a furter two consolidation levels available below that but it'd be a brave shorter that would put a lot of money behind adverse trades at those levels given the precedents IMO.
Nailed it.
Quoting for posterity.
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