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

[Hueristic]

You have limper wrists than men I've turned down at the bars, before Rick moseyed into my life.

Are you trying to say that Rick was the first to beat you at arm wrestling?  

In a manner of speaking, I obliterated Rick at arm wrestling, and he responded with "Sir, may I have another ?"

We sorta, uhh... connected... after that.

Bob, why do I think of this guy when I think of you?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPBp6DOwgU

[eXPHHorizon]

Is it just me or i see BTC more like this guy ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJwMbbP1MpM

His aura is green and his power is limitless which makes even Vegeta shit himself  

[bitserve]

Is it just me or i see BTC more like this guy ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJwMbbP1MpM

His aura is green and his power is limitless which makes even Vegeta shit himself  

No way. Bitcoin IS this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c36UNSoJenI

[OutOfMemory]

You have limper wrists than men I've turned down at the bars, before Rick moseyed into my life.

Are you trying to say that Rick was the first to beat you at arm wrestling?  

In a manner of speaking, I obliterated Rick at arm wrestling, and he responded with "Sir, may I have another ?"

We sorta, uhh... connected... after that.

+1 WOsMerit  

You could have held 1 BTC, instead of losing your freaking mind, and selling out like a drag queen in Manhattan.

I guess only gentlemand could have said something like this in a more imaginational way.
(i hope that's the right wording, i mean in a way of strong visual representation of a thought)

[Arriemoller]

I am going to post something quite unpopular.  It will make some people mad at me.  This is not certain, but I would say it is a 50/50 probability right now.  I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I am worry that I am not.  

The US has dun goofed its coronavirus response.  The US locked down too slow, and now it is reopening up too fast.  With the exception of New York, case rates are still rising in every state.  Nebraska, which reopened on Monday, reported a 57% case rate rise in the past 7 days.  In saying this I acknowledge that testing levels are so low it is hard to work out what is really happening except we know there are superclusters at the meatworks which are not closing because they have been deemed essential.  

We have extremely bad economic data.  On some readings, the data is worse than the Great Depression.  This puts the political leadership at both State and Federal level under enormous pressure to reopen.  So I can understand why they are doing it, particularly given there is not the appetite for the social welfare schemes which have been rolled out in other countries to support workers staying in their jobs.

But know this.  By half-arsing the lockdown and pulling out too early, and then triggering a crushing second wave in late summer / early fall, the economy will get refucked.  The number one mistake is thinking that fighting the virus and supporting the economy are mutually opposed aims.  They aren't.  Crush the virus and you can have a thriving economy back.  Surrender to the virus and you also surrender your economy.  Because when your hospitals overflow and your doctors are all dying and there are bodies in the street, there will not be a functioning economy.  Reopening now, before adequate testing and tracing is available, and while case loads are still rising, is an act of surrender.  

The consequences are not going to flow immediately.  Things are going to feel just fine through the next couple of months of summer.  It will be warm out.  People will say that the warm weather killed the virus.  Everyone will be outdoors, drinking beer and having a nice time.  Food and bev will start to do a roaring trade again.  People will think we are winning.  There will be cluster outbreaks which will be blamed on poor management by the Governors.  Some regional hospitals will be overwhelmed, but they will be a long way away.  

But come late summer or early fall, shit is going to start to become visibly bad.  We know the second wave of the Spanish Flu killed far more than the first wave.  195,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu in the month of October 1918.  There are 328 million people in the US.  The Lancet estimates the Case Fatality Rate of coronavirus at 1.38%.  Australia's actual Case Fatality Rate is 1.33%, which is one of the lowest CFRs in the world, reflecting a world class health care which is not under stress and massive testing, increasing the size of the denominator.  If half of the US population catches coronavirus, and the CFR is optimistically 1.33%, then that is 4.3 million deaths across America.  If the hospitals collapse, the death toll has the potential to get much higher.  

I think the reality is we will not get there, and there will be a series of smaller state level, or town level lockdowns.  This rolling wave of small lockdowns will fuck the economy good and will spark open conflict between the White House and State / local government.  

What does this mean for Bitcoin?  I believe that Bitcoin is still predominantly driven by US retail demand.  I also believe that there is at least a 50/50 chance that the US economy will be fucked good between now and November.  The confounding factor is that the halvening will reduce supply by 50%.  Normally I would regard this as a sure thing, but it needs to be balanced against a possibly very sick US economy.  Further complicating matters, just about every other developed country in the world has managed to figure out how to beat the virus and will be back on the path to recovery behind locked borders.  People in those countries will be able to buy Bitcoin.  

My conclusion is that we should not expect an ATH this year, and there is a 50% chance that we will not see the AYH again of $10,501 set in February 2020.  Volatility will likely stay very high, which means the opportunity to profit from extreme swings and also opportunity to be liquidated if you are using anything other than very low leverage (less than 1x leverage).    So be defensive and don't hold open long positions past the halvening.  

Good luck and stay safe.  

A. Sweden disagrees
B. The actual fatality rate among infected is somewhere between 0,36 and 0,2 according to the latest studies in Europe.

[JayJuanGee]

This is a food distribution center (bread line) in Las Vegas.



I have to note that every single car there is much nicer and newer than anything I own.

Hm.

A possible interpretation is that people who have otherwise led comfortable middle class lives their entire life are suddenly on the bread line through no fault of their own.

Or maybe they did overspend in the car (and presumably other things too) if they don't have enough savings for at least a few months.

In the USA, outside of the BIG cities, almost everyone owns a car, even poor people.  

Typically, a beaten up truck, NOT a LEXUS, and it is in the middle of the sin city, but i get your point...someone could be just one paycheck away from losing that vehicle to a repo-man.

If you need to buy a car with credit that's not the car you should be buying. You can buy perfectly nice and working used cars of any type just for a few thousands in cash. Even some mid-high end ones for a couple tens.

Almost the only thing reasonable to buy on credit is real estate... and that after careful planning and consideration.

And, as I said, someone that does that probably also overspend in many other things.

I would rephrase the concept of buying on credit, and there are ways to use credit in such a way that magnifies any persons ability to get wealthy or to stay way more wealthy than s/he would have otherwise had been capable by ONLY using his personal (not related to credit) resources.

In other words, any asset that is either able to appreciate in value faster than the credit rate would be a good way to use credit, and of course, part of the trick is projecting properly, and when any of us uses credit in terms of attempting to magnify our wealth, we are adding an additional level of risk that is pays off way better if we end up being at least somewhat directionally correct in our assessments of our investments.. including timeline for paying the debt or defaulting on it... there are some people who get rich by defaulting on their debt, but those tend to be the most rich fucktwats rather than regular people.  Regular people should probably avoid situations in which they are either defaulting on their debt or incurring penalties because of their poor management of their debt.

In the case of a car purchase, surely there are going to be some cars that hold their value better than others, but sometimes there might be reasons to either buy new or to upgrade to a luxury version (leasing or short term rental could accomplish some of this, too), such as in a business context in which you might be trying to send a certain kind of message in terms of your credibility or your level of wealth/status (scammers do this, too, but such message sending purposes for luxury are NOT necessarily scammy in and of themselves but could be good business in certain contexts, depending on intended audience(s)).    

[edited out]

You (should) only use credit to SAVE (ie: to own a property instead of renting for the same monthly amount or even lower) not to SPEND more. Doing otherwise is nuts and usually the reason why people with a more than healthy income are constantly in the verge of bankruptcy.

Cannot disagree with you here, bitserve.  Difference between kinds of uses of credit, whether it is investing or consumption, and surely use of credit for investment is better than use of credit for consumption.

[Biodom]

I am going to post something quite unpopular.  

A. Sweden disagrees
B. The actual fatality rate among infected is somewhere between 0,36 and 0,2 according to the latest studies in Europe.

You cannot judge this based on one country experience. One country could differ because of a multitude of parameters (demographics, genetics, weather, humidity, obesity, etc). Also, anecdotal evidence is not really evidence.
Here is a real study (by countries):
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Mind you, the REAL number (%%) is certainly lower due to asymptomatic cases that we don't know about.
Obtaining a correct denominator vs number who did not have it yet is VERY difficult considering that in US, for example, very few of the non-admitted to hospital populace has been tested for either CV OR antibodies.

[OutOfMemory]

I am going to post something quite unpopular.  It will make some people mad at me.  This is not certain, but I would say it is a 50/50 probability right now.  I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I am worry that I am not.  

The US has dun goofed its coronavirus response.  The US locked down too slow, and now it is reopening up too fast.  With the exception of New York, case rates are still rising in every state.  Nebraska, which reopened on Monday, reported a 57% case rate rise in the past 7 days.  In saying this I acknowledge that testing levels are so low it is hard to work out what is really happening except we know there are superclusters at the meatworks which are not closing because they have been deemed essential.  

We have extremely bad economic data.  On some readings, the data is worse than the Great Depression.  This puts the political leadership at both State and Federal level under enormous pressure to reopen.  So I can understand why they are doing it, particularly given there is not the appetite for the social welfare schemes which have been rolled out in other countries to support workers staying in their jobs.

But know this.  By half-arsing the lockdown and pulling out too early, and then triggering a crushing second wave in late summer / early fall, the economy will get refucked.  The number one mistake is thinking that fighting the virus and supporting the economy are mutually opposed aims.  They aren't.  Crush the virus and you can have a thriving economy back.  Surrender to the virus and you also surrender your economy.  Because when your hospitals overflow and your doctors are all dying and there are bodies in the street, there will not be a functioning economy.  Reopening now, before adequate testing and tracing is available, and while case loads are still rising, is an act of surrender.  

The consequences are not going to flow immediately.  Things are going to feel just fine through the next couple of months of summer.  It will be warm out.  People will say that the warm weather killed the virus.  Everyone will be outdoors, drinking beer and having a nice time.  Food and bev will start to do a roaring trade again.  People will think we are winning.  There will be cluster outbreaks which will be blamed on poor management by the Governors.  Some regional hospitals will be overwhelmed, but they will be a long way away.  

But come late summer or early fall, shit is going to start to become visibly bad.  We know the second wave of the Spanish Flu killed far more than the first wave.  195,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu in the month of October 1918.  There are 328 million people in the US.  The Lancet estimates the Case Fatality Rate of coronavirus at 1.38%.  Australia's actual Case Fatality Rate is 1.33%, which is one of the lowest CFRs in the world, reflecting a world class health care which is not under stress and massive testing, increasing the size of the denominator.  If half of the US population catches coronavirus, and the CFR is optimistically 1.33%, then that is 4.3 million deaths across America.  If the hospitals collapse, the death toll has the potential to get much higher.  

I think the reality is we will not get there, and there will be a series of smaller state level, or town level lockdowns.  This rolling wave of small lockdowns will fuck the economy good and will spark open conflict between the White House and State / local government.  

What does this mean for Bitcoin?  I believe that Bitcoin is still predominantly driven by US retail demand.  I also believe that there is at least a 50/50 chance that the US economy will be fucked good between now and November.  The confounding factor is that the halvening will reduce supply by 50%.  Normally I would regard this as a sure thing, but it needs to be balanced against a possibly very sick US economy.  Further complicating matters, just about every other developed country in the world has managed to figure out how to beat the virus and will be back on the path to recovery behind locked borders.  People in those countries will be able to buy Bitcoin.  

My conclusion is that we should not expect an ATH this year, and there is a 50% chance that we will not see the AYH again of $10,501 set in February 2020.  Volatility will likely stay very high, which means the opportunity to profit from extreme swings and also opportunity to be liquidated if you are using anything other than very low leverage (less than 1x leverage).    So be defensive and don't hold open long positions past the halvening.  

Good luck and stay safe.  

A. Sweden disagrees
B. The actual fatality rate among infected is somewhere between 0,36 and 0,2 according to the latest studies in Europe.

Not this again...
Most of these fatalities stay one or two weeks in a hospital, take up quite some resources like ventilators and have to be quarantined in ICUs.
Do you grasp the gravitiy of this?

[OutOfMemory]

The Market Cap of Bitcoin keeps growing and if we look at it from the Market Cap perspective then Bitcoin is already stronger than Vegeta even if Vegeta is in his God form . Go BTC GO !

To the Trillion $ Market Cap and Beyond !

Statements like this always let my mind "play" this track:
(One of the favourite bands/ tunes of my youth).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us104f-5vuM

And I raise you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnhvvsMLcAI&list=OLAK5uy_kJBy3DBeQzvetbjJ5udfWYFHARO5BZjPI

Bad Brains! This is the album i stumbled over in record shops regularly back then, it was advertised a lot in the skate magazines, but i still somehow refused to give it a listen.
Years later, i couldn't remember that band and album title, and it made me mad that i didn't have a second chance to find out how it sounds.
I only reminded that album cover...
I can't thank you enough for posting this today, dude!

[JayJuanGee]

Soon.....

 "soon" has already been happening

In other words, maybe I should speak with memes so my straight-forward message might MOAR better sink in.

This is what I am saying:



Makes sense?

[heslo]

Wow it is going nuts.

Good news is, my acquisition cost is now near zero. Bad news is I own only a fraction of what I had before.

When the price is nearing 10k I guess good news isn't actually good. Send this to 100k and I can get myself a tesla.   To the moon!

I am not sad for selling actually. I am sad for buying too much and becoming overinvested. Hopefully a mistake that I won't repeat again. We are still the early adopters right? Right? 

I can't help feel like you're here trying to convince us you're fine with your decision in order to convince yourself that you're fine with it. I think you panicked and now you're regretting acting so quickly when in reality nothing changed in the market to warrant you selling. Just a flash sell of like we've had many times before into oversold territory.

Regardless, I hope you can (learn to) live with your decision if (when) the price starts to get higher and higher. I wish you well mate; don't stop checking in from time to time

[HairyMaclairy]

Two more examples of low death rate:


Iceland: 1,801 confirmed cases, 10 deaths.

Good point.  This is a Case Fatality Rate of 0.55%.  Possibly the Australian CFR is skewed upwards by the cohort - lots of old unhealthy people on cruise ships.  

Singapore: 21,707 confirmed cases, 20 deaths.


They also do LOTS of tests (Iceland is number one with 144,800 tests per mil)

Cohort here is over 90% migrant workers in dormitories.  Young to middle aged men, thus at the lower end of the risk spectrum. Not representative of the general population.  But an excellent result.  Only question is how old the infections are.  It takes a long time to die from coronavirus if you  are health so you can to give people 45 - 60 days to die. 

[Searing]

Fun times at Bitmain Mining.

https://www.coindesk.com/internal-struggle-bitcoin-mining-bitmain-escalates-physical-confrontation-micree-zhan

[OutOfMemory]

The next 60 hours are not entirely insignificant!

Fuck... it's snowing here.

They do finally have internet in alaska?  

EDIT: Somehow i slipped three or four pages of WO backwards when i was reading/commenting this.
I must admit that i made some chocolate, spiced with the concentrated leftovers of my (weed) vaporizer, yesterday  

[GaretJohanKay]

Since this time are more miners and future contracts, even if bitcoin falls under $5000 don`t will be there much time. The psychology of the market maybe will make that the people hodl, more time than other times. But if with this crisis  large reputed investors interested in bitcoin like the case with Tudor, That will become a new support and also the use case that cryptocurrency is bringing all over the world. So I think the trick here is find the fundamental support

[HairyMaclairy]

A. Sweden disagrees
B. The actual fatality rate among infected is somewhere between 0,36 and 0,2 according to the latest studies in Europe.

Sweden has a Case Fatality Rate of 12.3%.  Obviously the real CFR is lower than that, but impossible to tell what it really is due to lack of testing.

[JayJuanGee]

I am going to post something quite unpopular.  It will make some people mad at me.  This is not certain, but I would say it is a 50/50 probability right now.  I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I am worry that I am not.  

I have difficulties understanding how anyone can be mad at you for presenting a well-reasoned argument, even if some of us might not agree with some of your presumptions or conclusions... but in the end, you are making a lot of reasonable observations based on currently available information.

Sure, if it were to appear that you were merely spinning or talking your book or some bullshit like that, then that would be another story... There is no evidence to establish that you are doing any of those things.. at least so far I don't see any of that kind of evidence.

My conclusion is that we should not expect an ATH this year, and there is a 50% chance that we will not see the AYH again of $10,501 set in February 2020.  Volatility will likely stay very high, which means the opportunity to profit from extreme swings and also opportunity to be liquidated if you are using anything other than very low leverage (less than 1x leverage).    So be defensive and don't hold open long positions past the halvening.  

I am a little bit unclear about what appears to be a couple of your points in the above paragraph, here.

First:  In regards to your recommendation of NOT holding open long positions: Are you merely referring to not holding open leveraged longs or are you referring to closing all longs (which would mean selling all of your BTC)?  Because there are a large number of members here who have been long as fuck in BTC, and mostly only play long in terms of accumulating BTC over a long period of time.  In other words, DCAing, buying on dips and HODLing.. are proven sound strategies for largely playing the long game.. and with this approach, most longer term BTC holders strive to NOT give too many shits about the noises that might occur in shorter time periods, including the fact that either the four-year BTC price prediction fractal might not end up working out as hoped or the stock to flow model BTC price prediction model might be delayed by a few years..... or perhaps need to be otherwise tweaked in a downwards direction.  In the end, these long accumulations are long term, so they do not get caught up in short term noise, even if the value of their portfolio might go down because the value of BTC goes down in the short term.  You are not saying that regular longs (rather than leveraged ones) should sell, too, are you?

Second:  This question might be a bit less serious, but still would be nice to get a response from you in terms of correction levels that you are anticipating.. or maybe you are largely just presuming flat, rather than up?  Anyhow,  I am not trying to pick on Mindrust, and of course, I do not wish anything badly upon mindrust on a personal level, but he is a very good example of recent happenings.  Accordingly, are you speculating that either mindrust will be able to buy back his BTC at a profit or maybe alternatively that he might be able to significantly mitigate his losses which might mean buying back his BTC in the sub $6k arena?  

**Remember, for clarity sake, that Mindrust sold all 10 of his BTC in about the mid $4ks, and according to his latest report, he has ONLY been DCA-ing into bitcoin at about $50 per week (for the sake of the sanity of topic clarity in this thread, we will ignore whatever his dumbass injections of value may have been or continue to be into various shitcoins).

If you conclude that I am being too pesky, then I will proclaim that "I am asking all of this for a friend."        


Edit:

Come on hairy grow a sack 

I'm not selling bro.  I'm postulating.  And putting my leveraged long entry points very deep. 

This may have largely answered my first question (above)... might not hurt to elaborate, though, hairy.

[heslo]

Fun times at Bitmain Mining.

https://www.coindesk.com/internal-struggle-bitcoin-mining-bitmain-escalates-physical-confrontation-micree-zhan

I swear that company is a melting pot of deceit and backstabbing. More drama than an episode of Bold and the Beautiful

[HairyMaclairy]

JJG:  my bad.  I meant not holding open leveraged long positions which could get liquidated.  I am about 93% BTC, 7% cash at the moment.  

I don’t know what level we could revisit and I am not going to forecast it.  It could be mild or it could be severe.  I am using my 7% cash to place staggered buy orders all the way down the scale and will leave it at that.  I won't enter any leveraged longs until below $6k at earliest as I don't want to be caught with a high averaged cost base for those leveraged longs.      

The stock market is way too high right now.  

Here is the SPX500.  There is no justification for us to be sitting at October 2019 levels.  The market has gotten ahead of itself with the promise of reopening, not realising that reopening is going to see bad times.  The stock market "should" tank.  In writing this I acknowledge conventional wisdom is you should never fight the Fed.  So the market is going to swing on interpreting the Fed.

[JayJuanGee]

[edited out]

I agree with almost all of that. The only thing I would say is wrong is what happens when the economy gets refucked. The end game for the current financial system should have been a decade away at least, but once the cascading defaults begin, there will be two options. Massive deflation, on a scale never before seen as the debt unwinds through default, or massive inflation as all the debt is printed to oblivion to avoid the deflation scenario. The people making the decisions know they are going to have to destroy both the dollar and the current monetary system. They all wish they could have kicked the can a little bit further so it was the next person who had to deal with it. But COVID has bought the whole clusterfuck to a head. Bitcoin will soar against a dollar that destroys itself, because it must be destroyed. The deflation scenario will be too terrifying for those in charge to contemplate. They will see their heads on spikes. Things are going to get very weird I think, it will probably be good for bitcoin, but it will be really fucked up in so many other ways we may not care as much as we think we will.

Maybe clarification from you might be helpful, too, random_australian.

I really despise putting too much weight on Armageddon scenarios, even though various aspects of the current path seems to be striving in that direction... whether purposeful or incidental.

So, it is not that I disagree with you, random_australian, but in my experience, it seems to have been a lot more healthy to attempt to figure out more likely scenarios rather than putting too much weight on Armageddon scenarios, even though we cannot completely ignore Armageddon scenarios when they have gone from less than 1% odds to something closer to 5% to 8%, which is nothing to sneeze at, but still does not mean that we should be putting more than 10% efforts/preparations into scenarios that still seem to be having less than 8% odds, right?