I think there is a good chance we get a new ATH in the following weeks. Most of us expected it sometime after the halving, but things developed unexpectedly if favour of a much earlier ATH breach. I feel sorry for bears trolling about a correction at 4K, then 5k, then 6K,.... and now at 13K. But it didn't happen! These shorters are just comparing charts from previous years and trying to make predictions. But as their posts show, they have little or no knowledge of the current market situation. The fact is that there are so many circumstances that are different compared to 2017 and all are in favour of Bitcoin. I'll try to explain to those who didn't follow closely the market in 2017:
1. Why in 2017 there were so many 40%-ish corrections, and in the last 6 months we had none?
Answer: In Jan 2017, when the price was heading to beat the ATH at $1140-ish, a sudden news appeared on the website of PBOC (people bank of China). It threatened the major China's exchanges with a ban if they don't meet the requirements. This lead to a sudden 40% crash. Since back then 95% of all Bitcoin trades were made in China's exchanges, the panic was huge. Not only that, but similar news appeared multiple times in Jan, Feb and in Sept. 2017. There was the first ETF denial - another crash. Also, in June there was a decision for a fork, which stalled the market for the Summer. Then in November another more dangereous fork was looming, but thankfully it was cancelled. Then Bcashers started the attack of 'flippening' by selling over 100K
BTC in a few days and buying over 2mil bcash. Of course, none of these news matter in 2019.
2. Was the price 20K too high and because of that there was a 80%-ish crash for a year?
Answer. Each time the last ATH is surpassed, traders feel fear whether the price is not too high. Since in 2017 the raise from 700$ to 20K was too big, this fear prevailed. The whole 2018 traders were afraid how low Bitcoin can crash and the buys were pretty low compared to the sells. Does this mean that the price was not sustainable if we exclude the fear? The answer is no, since the price managed to increase with so many bad news and corrections in 2017!
3. When we reach 20K will be there a similar crash?
Answer. There might be some 'bigger'correction because of the fear of repeating the history. But it won't last for a year and 3 months for sure, because of the next halving. If it happens, it will be for several weeks/months until the ATH is finally breached. The worst possible scenario is to have a day with a 40% crash from the top, and by the end of the day 20% to be recovered. Then slowly for several weeks the remaining 20% will be recovered. Or we can just blaze through 20K like a knife in butter, who knows!
And finally, two more observations:
4. Altcoins boomed also at the end of 2017. This was a huge loss of cash, that might have been used for buying bitcoins.
5. Compared to 2017, some of the volume of Bitfinex is now redirected towards Bitstamp, Kraken and Coinbase. This makes it more difficult for the price to crash. At the same time, the overall volume of all major exchanges remains half of what was in 2017 (Bitfinex was a beast then), according to
https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?c=e&t=b (not working ATM, and even if we include Binance, which wasn't a thing in 2017). This is because hodlers bring more coins after multiple ATH's and it becomes more difficult for the market to absorb the new coins. While now, hodlers know that 20K will be reached and breached and don't bring many new coins on the exchanges. So traders have fewer and fewer coins to buy. At the same time, tens and hundreds of millions new comers enter exchanges. Their fiat potential is much bigger than the newly mined coins, considering that even in 2017 their potential was most probably enough to reach 40-50K.
P.s. As I was writing this post, the price shooted from 12800 to over 13400!!! Way to go, Bitcoin! Good job!
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