Calling top at $16500 (New speculation: Guess the price 19 Feb 2021!)

[JayJuanGee]

[edited out]

Absolutely correct. Topic was always about BTC price and the forecast was made long before any fork action, purely based on crowd behaviour.

The question as to what happens once the bottom is un remains unanswered, but given I'm suggesting 2021 for that, we have a long way to go.

Sure I had already noticed that you are a lot more short-term bearish than me, and I my investment practices of buying on the way down and selling on the way up does not really attempt to get into any specifics regarding what I might believe the BTC price is going to do in the shorter term, except that I anticipate in the longer term that BTC prices are going to be higher than they are today.  So, dragging out to 2021, does seem a bit much, even though I remain prepared in case that scenario plays out.. I am NOT going to change my practices based on something that may or may not happen.. and frankly I believe that the odds for up are greater than the odds for down, currently, maybe it is only slightly greater, but it is still greater from my current thinking.

At that point people might want to reflect on the fundamentals, because as I've said so many times before, speculative run-ups are always predicated by the rising price in line with the s-curve of adoption... e.g this post from 2014

...snip...

A. There is an underlying sigmoid function (wikipedia'd that one!) that drives base valuation - the adoption curve.
B. That the market price is some cyclical function underpinned by the base valuation (A).
C. We end with widespread adoption after about 10 years, representing a base value of BTC based on some percentage of the economy. I picked risto's $300k because its as good a figure as any

...snip...

Only when speculation is secondary to base utility price can we establish a new baseline.

Hopefully, your measures of utility are correct from your own thinking.  Of course, price is a product of both speculation and utility, so I would not want to get too narrowed in on some kinds of price indication necessities (has to be assertions).

For the next speculative BTC run you have to have more adoption than during the last market bottom (ie the 200 range for the best part of 2015). Failure to make new lows is what gives people the confidence to buy again. To catalyse a new speculative run-up you need price to be increasing as result of utility/adoption (since the speculators have left). When adoption is causing higher lows, that's when speculators take note and the cycle begins again.

Back in the day adoption used to be measured by how many coffee shops can you buy bitcoin. Now, I'd be more inclined to look at e.g.business use at scale

YMMV but lets wait until this market cycle is complete and price discovery establishes a new BTC baseline before we talk about the next speculative run-up. You might feel very differently over the coming year(s) as things unfold.

Yes, we will see what happens in terms of adoption and/or other pressures upon the supply.  Seems to me that bearwhales are going to attempt to manipulate BTC's price down for as low as they can get it to go and for as long as they can.  But sometimes they just cannot keep the price down.  Whether we need to go lower from here may or not be known until we look back at the situation, and we have seen in previous halvenings, that the real pressures on the price, because of the reduced supply do not become felt until several months after the halvening.  I have my doubts about whether BTC prices can remained kept down until 2021, but we will see how it plays out.  I would not want to be inadequately prepared for UP in the event that further down does not happen from here... and we have surely witnessed a decent amount of that (lack of preparation for UP) in bitcoin's history.

Accordingly, accumulate and HODL and buying BTC on dips have continued to be the better ongoing long term strategies in bitcoin that have tended to work out quite well for those people following such strategies rather than attempting to time the market such as wait for lower and other fence sitting nonsense like that.  Selling after a correction and trying to buy back lower would likely even be a worse strategy that tries to time the market rather than just accumulating holding and buying on dips, but people can do whatever they are going to do... and see how it all plays out for them.

[1713585442]

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[1713585442]

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[JL0]

Quick look at the weekly



Price continues to track the second down leg as expected...

the 50 & 200 day EMA's look to have established a pretty convincing downtrend. Price is heading back towards the bottom of the big triangle that broke down on 12th November I expect the ~6100 to be a pretty key level. However, I wouldn't expect that to be tested until late Jan.

If anyone can make something positive out of this chart then I'm anxious to see it!

Could you post this chart on Tradingview? I would like to follow it  .
The 200MA is very strong and you don't think it we'll hold it ?

Thank you

[thecodebear]

Your prediction of a largely flat BTC prices in 2020 and perhaps only a slight increase in BTC prices in 2021 seem to have pretty damned low chances of happening in the minds of anyone who has actually studied the patterns of the Bitcoin space including the stock to flow model, the four-year fractal model, the s-curve exponential adoption metcalfe networking model and any other similar models that seem to demonstrate an increase in ongoing BTC buying pressures with the passage of time, especially in these seemingly early days of adoption.

To be fair, those models aren't definitive or proven. If they were, we wouldn't be trading in the $7,000s since Bitcoin's future value would be assured. Extrapolating works until it doesn't.

I do understand where he's coming from in terms of market cycles. Market bottoms are usually long, sideways accumulation periods, sort of like BTC in 2015. To be honest, I never felt we had that sort of accumulation off the $3,000s. It's possible the rally to the $13,800s was part of a multi-year accumulation period and we have lots more sideways ahead of us. This is not what I'm expecting but it's possible. Masterluc is predicting something like that now: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274613.msg53048197#msg53048197

Big difference between 2018/2019 accumulation and 2015 accumulation was something like 2015 had never happened in Bitcoin before. Lots of people who had planned to hold long term, myself included, left the market thinking the Bitcoin experiment was over because the market had never seen anything like that bear market before. The next time around there was now a history of such a long bear market so in 2018 thru early 2019 people stayed around ready to buy at the bottom. General sentiment among people who wanted to stay in the market I feel like in 2015 was "will this ever recover?!", while in 2018/early-2019 it was "i can't wait till this recovers, time to load up now". And so you would expect a shorter bottom because with a longer proven history of market cycles continuing more people are gonna be confident in future growth and actually accumulate at the bottom, building bull pressure more quickly, rather than simply leaving the market and the price sitting flat for a very long time.

Also I think you see in the 2nd half of 2019 the result of the shorter bottom of the market. People knew the bear market was a temporary thing, and so built up buy pressure quicker than 2015, and when the bottom broke and the new bull market started people got overly excited and so we got another half year of downtrend after the start of the new market cycle.

Also the price of Bitcoin in 2018 was "flat with bounces" at $6k for a long time. If you include that accumulation time in with the $3k accumulation time then it was a lot of months to accumulate. Accumulate doesn't just mean the market bottom, because you only truly know the market bottom after it has well passed (though it was very obvious when we hit $3k that was it, but it was much less obvious $6k wasn't the bottom). Accumulation is more whenever price drops and then goes flat for a while and people see a good safe opportunity to buy low for a while. The fact that the price did then fall off a cliff to $3000s doesn't mean there weren't several months of accumulation going on at $6000s as well.

So there's been tons of accumulation time in 2018 and 2019. Several months of 6000s, 4.5 months of 3000s, and second half of 2019 several months of 6000s to 8000s (with that giant ridiculous China-news pop to $10,000s in between).

[exstasie]

Big difference between 2018/2019 accumulation and 2015 accumulation was something like 2015 had never happened in Bitcoin before. Lots of people who had planned to hold long term, myself included, left the market thinking the Bitcoin experiment was over because the market had never seen anything like that bear market before. The next time around there was now a history of such a long bear market so in 2018 thru early 2019 people stayed around ready to buy at the bottom. General sentiment among people who wanted to stay in the market I feel like in 2015 was "will this ever recover?!", while in 2018/early-2019 it was "i can't wait till this recovers, time to load up now".

That's the scary thing. I'm a contrarian; I trade against popular sentiment because it usually works really well. I never got that "Bitcoin is dead, time to give up the dream" feeling from the market in 2018. There was no despair phase, just some relatively short lived chop at the bottom. That 2015-like despair/capitulation isn't required for a historic bottom, but it certainly would have made it easier to recognize.

Also I think you see in the 2nd half of 2019 the result of the shorter bottom of the market. People knew the bear market was a temporary thing, and so built up buy pressure quicker than 2015, and when the bottom broke and the new bull market started people got overly excited and so we got another half year of downtrend after the start of the new market cycle.

Good point. I had figured we had gone "too far too fast" with the 2019 rally and therefore had to correct hard to shake out the marginal hands. This seems to go in line with that narrative.

[JayJuanGee]

Your prediction of a largely flat BTC prices in 2020 and perhaps only a slight increase in BTC prices in 2021 seem to have pretty damned low chances of happening in the minds of anyone who has actually studied the patterns of the Bitcoin space including the stock to flow model, the four-year fractal model, the s-curve exponential adoption metcalfe networking model and any other similar models that seem to demonstrate an increase in ongoing BTC buying pressures with the passage of time, especially in these seemingly early days of adoption.

To be fair, those models aren't definitive or proven. If they were, we wouldn't be trading in the $7,000s since Bitcoin's future value would be assured. Extrapolating works until it doesn't.

I do understand where he's coming from in terms of market cycles. Market bottoms are usually long, sideways accumulation periods, sort of like BTC in 2015. To be honest, I never felt we had that sort of accumulation off the $3,000s. It's possible the rally to the $13,800s was part of a multi-year accumulation period and we have lots more sideways ahead of us. This is not what I'm expecting but it's possible. Masterluc is predicting something like that now: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274613.msg53048197#msg53048197

Big difference between 2018/2019 accumulation and 2015 accumulation was something like 2015 had never happened in Bitcoin before. Lots of people who had planned to hold long term, myself included, left the market thinking the Bitcoin experiment was over because the market had never seen anything like that bear market before. The next time around there was now a history of such a long bear market so in 2018 thru early 2019 people stayed around ready to buy at the bottom. General sentiment among people who wanted to stay in the market I feel like in 2015 was "will this ever recover?!", while in 2018/early-2019 it was "i can't wait till this recovers, time to load up now". And so you would expect a shorter bottom because with a longer proven history of market cycles continuing more people are gonna be confident in future growth and actually accumulate at the bottom, building bull pressure more quickly, rather than simply leaving the market and the price sitting flat for a very long time.

Also I think you see in the 2nd half of 2019 the result of the shorter bottom of the market. People knew the bear market was a temporary thing, and so built up buy pressure quicker than 2015, and when the bottom broke and the new bull market started people got overly excited and so we got another half year of downtrend after the start of the new market cycle.

Also the price of Bitcoin in 2018 was "flat with bounces" at $6k for a long time. If you include that accumulation time in with the $3k accumulation time then it was a lot of months to accumulate. Accumulate doesn't just mean the market bottom, because you only truly know the market bottom after it has well passed (though it was very obvious when we hit $3k that was it, but it was much less obvious $6k wasn't the bottom). Accumulation is more whenever price drops and then goes flat for a while and people see a good safe opportunity to buy low for a while. The fact that the price did then fall off a cliff to $3000s doesn't mean there weren't several months of accumulation going on at $6000s as well.

So there's been tons of accumulation time in 2018 and 2019. Several months of 6000s, 4.5 months of 3000s, and second half of 2019 several months of 6000s to 8000s (with that giant ridiculous China-news pop to $10,000s in between).

I agree with a lot of what you said above, thecodebear, but I have some trouble with your assertion that it was obvious that $3k was the bottom, so in that regard, it might have been a bit unclear during that 4.5 months between November 2018 and March 2019 that the bottom was in.

In recent times, I have been thinking that our move from $4,200 to $13,880 in three months was a kind of indication that $3k was the bottom, and that the difficulties of getting back down, and even close to $3k again, in 2019 has provided pretty decent assurance that $3,124 was our bottom for this cycle. 

We surely are not even past our December 22 - $6,424 serving as the local bottom for this most recent correction trend... Hopefully our current upwards movement is giving more space and time to that bottom, because I would surely prefer to resume up, but we can never really rest assured until we get some distance in terms of both price and time in order to conclusively call a bottom, as you already alluded to difficulties of in-the-midst-of-it dynamics.

[JayJuanGee]

Your prediction of a largely flat BTC prices in 2020 and perhaps only a slight increase in BTC prices in 2021 seem to have pretty damned low chances of happening in the minds of anyone who has actually studied the patterns of the Bitcoin space including the stock to flow model, the four-year fractal model, the s-curve exponential adoption metcalfe networking model and any other similar models that seem to demonstrate an increase in ongoing BTC buying pressures with the passage of time, especially in these seemingly early days of adoption.

To be fair, those models aren't definitive or proven. If they were, we wouldn't be trading in the $7,000s since Bitcoin's future value would be assured. Extrapolating works until it doesn't.

I do understand where he's coming from in terms of market cycles. Market bottoms are usually long, sideways accumulation periods, sort of like BTC in 2015. To be honest, I never felt we had that sort of accumulation off the $3,000s. It's possible the rally to the $13,800s was part of a multi-year accumulation period and we have lots more sideways ahead of us. This is not what I'm expecting but it's possible. Masterluc is predicting something like that now: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274613.msg53048197#msg53048197

Big difference between 2018/2019 accumulation and 2015 accumulation was something like 2015 had never happened in Bitcoin before. Lots of people who had planned to hold long term, myself included, left the market thinking the Bitcoin experiment was over because the market had never seen anything like that bear market before. The next time around there was now a history of such a long bear market so in 2018 thru early 2019 people stayed around ready to buy at the bottom. General sentiment among people who wanted to stay in the market I feel like in 2015 was "will this ever recover?!", while in 2018/early-2019 it was "i can't wait till this recovers, time to load up now". And so you would expect a shorter bottom because with a longer proven history of market cycles continuing more people are gonna be confident in future growth and actually accumulate at the bottom, building bull pressure more quickly, rather than simply leaving the market and the price sitting flat for a very long time.

Also I think you see in the 2nd half of 2019 the result of the shorter bottom of the market. People knew the bear market was a temporary thing, and so built up buy pressure quicker than 2015, and when the bottom broke and the new bull market started people got overly excited and so we got another half year of downtrend after the start of the new market cycle.

Also the price of Bitcoin in 2018 was "flat with bounces" at $6k for a long time. If you include that accumulation time in with the $3k accumulation time then it was a lot of months to accumulate. Accumulate doesn't just mean the market bottom, because you only truly know the market bottom after it has well passed (though it was very obvious when we hit $3k that was it, but it was much less obvious $6k wasn't the bottom). Accumulation is more whenever price drops and then goes flat for a while and people see a good safe opportunity to buy low for a while. The fact that the price did then fall off a cliff to $3000s doesn't mean there weren't several months of accumulation going on at $6000s as well.

So there's been tons of accumulation time in 2018 and 2019. Several months of 6000s, 4.5 months of 3000s, and second half of 2019 several months of 6000s to 8000s (with that giant ridiculous China-news pop to $10,000s in between).

I agree with a lot of what you said above, thecodebear, but I have some trouble with your assertion that it was obvious that $3k was the bottom, so in that regard, it might have been a bit unclear during that 4.5 months between November 2018 and March 2019 that the bottom was in.

In recent times, I have been thinking that our move from $4,200 to $13,880 in three months was a kind of indication that $3k was the bottom, and that the difficulties of getting back down, and even close to $3k again, in 2019 has provided pretty decent assurance that $3,124 was our bottom for this cycle.  

We surely are not even past our December 22 - $6,424 serving as the local bottom for this most recent correction trend... Hopefully our current upwards movement is giving more space and time to that bottom, because I would surely prefer to resume up, but we can never really rest assured until we get some distance in terms of both price and time in order to conclusively call a bottom, as you already alluded to difficulties of in-the-midst-of-it dynamics.

In 2018 when Bitcoin went back to 6k there was a lot of belief (me included) that it was the bottom. So knowing where the bottom is isn't as simple as it seems. From what I remember Bitcoin went back to 6k area twice in 2018 (once in February and another time few months later), this price of 6k is well known for being a very strong support. I was myself accumulating. Thanks God I was patient enough until June 2019 but I confess a year ago I wasn't optimistic when we were at 3k.
Again we saw recently that this 6k area is a very strong support, if we go below 6k it means bear market for at least a year IMO.

I don't have any problem with any of the historical context that you said above, especially that we spent a lot of time at and above $6k in 2018, starting as early as February.  So surely spending so much time there and even bouncing off of it like 5 or 6 times before November 2018 helped to build a decent amount of confidence that BTC prices would not be significantly going below $6k, which surely proved to be wrong... but really in the whole scheme of things did not last very long (4.5 months).  

Regarding going below $6k again, yeah we might or we might not, and I doubt that such going below $6k and even staying there for a significant amount of time of even a month or more would be any kind of doom for BTC.  In other words, the fucktwat bearwhale manipulators are going to manipulate as much as they can and as far as they can, which also might include manipulating beyond belief to facilitate the spreading of FUD and even real disbelief in the models (such as stock to flow sound money, four-year fractal tying into halvening, s-curve adoption and network effects and various other contributing concepts) or even trying to break the models.. but in the end, those bearwhale fucktwats are quite unlikely to be successful especially in respect to your pie in the sky nonsense thinking of anything approaching some kind of need for a year in that arena.. given our actual halvening approaching context... and yeah, you are in that kind of fantasy land thinking because you either believe in other baloney models, or you are just in the business of spreading currently unlikely happenings in order to spread FUD or to talk your book.

[thecodebear]

I agree with a lot of what you said above, thecodebear, but I have some trouble with your assertion that it was obvious that $3k was the bottom, so in that regard, it might have been a bit unclear during that 4.5 months between November 2018 and March 2019 that the bottom was in.

In recent times, I have been thinking that our move from $4,200 to $13,880 in three months was a kind of indication that $3k was the bottom, and that the difficulties of getting back down, and even close to $3k again, in 2019 has provided pretty decent assurance that $3,124 was our bottom for this cycle.  

We surely are not even past our December 22 - $6,424 serving as the local bottom for this most recent correction trend... Hopefully our current upwards movement is giving more space and time to that bottom, because I would surely prefer to resume up, but we can never really rest assured until we get some distance in terms of both price and time in order to conclusively call a bottom, as you already alluded to difficulties of in-the-midst-of-it dynamics.

Saying how obvious it was when we were at the bottom is of course subjective, not everyone thought it was obvious or even thought it was the bottom at the time. But I think anyone who set fear aside and just looked at what was going on could say with a very high degree of confidence even as it was happening that $3k was the bottom.

I'm not saying predicting the bottom is easy at all, but I am saying when the bear market bottom hit it was readily apparent. When the price dropped from $6000, that wherever it settled (which ended up being the 3000s) was the bottom. For most of 2018 $6000 seemed like the bottom and I totally thought it was the bottom and was wrong by a factor of two! But when 3000s came it was like a big flashing sign saying this is the best price you'll ever get from here on out.

When I saw the price under $4000 I had no idea if 2000s or 3000s or 4000s would end up being the bottom range. But after it bounced off low 4000s and hung out in the 3000s for a bit it became obvious it was the bottom because (1) we had what seemed to be the bottom at 6k and then had textbook capitulation to 3k, exactly what you are looking for when discovering a bottom, and (2) it had at that point entered the normal historical crash levels for bitcoin of ~80%. I wasn't at all sure where the exact dollar bottom would be, maybe low 3000s or high 2000s or even like 2500, but I had 100% confidence that the 3000s was part of the bottom range that the price would be in until it broke out and started the market cycle.

In fact a year ago on here I was basically yelling at people telling them to buy now in the 3000s. People were talking about 1000s or low 2000s or saying that buying much higher like at $6k after the bottom had passed would be much better (the logic behind saying buying much higher is better still evades me haha). I think fear was clouding their judgement, because they were trying to argue that we still hadn't had capitulation and they were waiting for that, despite the drop from 6k to 3k being textbook capitulation - they were ignoring what had just happened in the market because fear was driving their outlook. Well that and a combination of greed, hoping to buy the absolute bottom and since they hadn't bought yet obviously that means the bottom hadn't been hit yet because they were gonna time it perfectly for sure haha.

As for me I didn't care about the actual dollar value of the absolute bottom, I just cared about the bottom range which we were clearly in, so over 4 months from Nov '18 to March '19 I was able to average a price of $3537, after not buying since beginning of Nov '17.



And are you really still not sure 3000s was the bottom? The night of April 1st, 2019, that first hour it broke through 4200 and went to 5000 it was very apparent the bottom was gone for good - you don't get a clean break out of the bottom of a bear market like that without it being the end of the bear market. The moment I checked the price and saw it had broken out of the bottom and was at like 4700 and rising I posted on here that the bottom was gone and the bull market had started. Not sure how you still question that after the over 3x gain in the months that followed and a local bottom 2x what the bear market bottom was. Even the most pessimistic people I would think would realize the bottom was gone by like May 2019 when it reached double the bottom range.

[JayJuanGee]

I agree with a lot of what you said above, thecodebear, but I have some trouble with your assertion that it was obvious that $3k was the bottom, so in that regard, it might have been a bit unclear during that 4.5 months between November 2018 and March 2019 that the bottom was in.

In recent times, I have been thinking that our move from $4,200 to $13,880 in three months was a kind of indication that $3k was the bottom, and that the difficulties of getting back down, and even close to $3k again, in 2019 has provided pretty decent assurance that $3,124 was our bottom for this cycle.  

We surely are not even past our December 22 - $6,424 serving as the local bottom for this most recent correction trend... Hopefully our current upwards movement is giving more space and time to that bottom, because I would surely prefer to resume up, but we can never really rest assured until we get some distance in terms of both price and time in order to conclusively call a bottom, as you already alluded to difficulties of in-the-midst-of-it dynamics.

Saying how obvious it was when we were at the bottom is of course subjective, not everyone thought it was obvious or even thought it was the bottom at the time. But I think anyone who set fear aside and just looked at what was going on could say with a very high degree of confidence even as it was happening that $3k was the bottom.

I'm not saying predicting the bottom is easy at all, but I am saying when the bear market bottom hit it was readily apparent. When the price dropped from $6000, that wherever it settled (which ended up being the 3000s) was the bottom. For most of 2018 $6000 seemed like the bottom and I totally thought it was the bottom and was wrong by a factor of two! But when 3000s came it was like a big flashing sign saying this is the best price you'll ever get from here on out.

When I saw the price under $4000 I had no idea if 2000s or 3000s or 4000s would end up being the bottom range. But after it bounced off low 4000s and hung out in the 3000s for a bit it became obvious it was the bottom because (1) we had what seemed to be the bottom at 6k and then had textbook capitulation to 3k, exactly what you are looking for when discovering a bottom, and (2) it had at that point entered the normal historical crash levels for bitcoin of ~80%. I wasn't at all sure where the exact dollar bottom would be, maybe low 3000s or high 2000s or even like 2500, but I had 100% confidence that the 3000s was part of the bottom range that the price would be in until it broke out and started the market cycle.

In fact a year ago on here I was basically yelling at people telling them to buy now in the 3000s. People were talking about 1000s or low 2000s or saying that buying much higher like at $6k after the bottom had passed would be much better (the logic behind saying buying much higher is better still evades me haha). I think fear was clouding their judgement, because they were trying to argue that we still hadn't had capitulation and they were waiting for that, despite the drop from 6k to 3k being textbook capitulation - they were ignoring what had just happened in the market because fear was driving their outlook. Well that and a combination of greed, hoping to buy the absolute bottom and since they hadn't bought yet obviously that means the bottom hadn't been hit yet because they were gonna time it perfectly for sure haha.

As for me I didn't care about the actual dollar value of the absolute bottom, I just cared about the bottom range which we were clearly in, so over 4 months from Nov '18 to March '19 I was able to average a price of $3537, after not buying since beginning of Nov '17.



And are you really still not sure 3000s was the bottom? The night of April 1st, 2019, that first hour it broke through 4200 and went to 5000 it was very apparent the bottom was gone for good - you don't get a clean break out of the bottom of a bear market like that without it being the end of the bear market. The moment I checked the price and saw it had broken out of the bottom and was at like 4700 and rising I posted on here that the bottom was gone and the bull market had started. Not sure how you still question that after the over 3x gain in the months that followed and a local bottom 2x what the bear market bottom was. Even the most pessimistic people I would think would realize the bottom was gone by like May 2019 when it reached double the bottom range.

I don't exactly agree with your assertion of clarity regarding various limits on BTC price points and how far that bitcoin prices can be reasonably manipulated beyond expectations, but I believe that you argued your points very well.... so I certainly agree about attempting to back up your arguments... with reasonable assertions, and surely there is a wide range of reasonableness, which means that we can still disagree.. and we might not exactly even know with any kind of precision why we disagree, and sometimes market speculation works like that.... people learn along the way and also sometimes continue to make the same mistakes over and over, too.

My BTC investment approach surely does not attempt to rely on any kind of short term BTC price predictions, and so in that regard, I like to believe that I am prepared for either price direction and even irrationality contained in some of the extremes, while at the same time, my underlying presumption remains that in the medium to long term, at least in terms of my own timeline considerations BTC prices are likely to go up... and of course, investment approaches are going to differ from person to person, and also in regards to whether s/he is in a BTC accumulation stage, maintenance stage or a liquidation stage - or some transition between those stages, which is also possible for people who are seriously attempting to tailor their BTC investment approach to their own circumstances that include their cash flow, other investments, views about bitcoin as compared with other investments, timeline, risk tolerance and skills and time that can be dedicated to learning and playing around with their investment(s)...

Anyhow, any of the personalized considerations should also involve considerations regarding how much is going to be allocated to bitcoin and hopeful periodic tweaking along the way too...  I like to consider that I am personally prepared for UPs and DOWNs and extremes that might not even happen, but I have also attempted to remove a lot of the emotions, too... even though when the extremes happen, which seems almost inevitable in bitcoin, it is difficult to NOT feel some emotions.. as long as we are actual humans rather than bots.  

I really am NOT sure how relevant it would be to get into my speculation or my preparations for unlikely events like sub $3k.. or even sub $4k, which seems to be nearly equally on the unlikeliness scale, but surely sub $3k or sub $4k are not non-zero considerations for me, currently... but I can say that at the same time, I don't spend a lot of time or energy preparing for very low level likelihood events like that, and we see this kind of nonsense frequently with the gold bugs who seem to be putting way too much preparations in Armageddon events that would make their physical gold become worthy of the amount that they have chosen to invest into it.... but anyhow, even truly introspective and non-book-talking gold bugs should realize that there is some prudence in putting some of their gold investment value into bitcoin, but if they are having some difficulties with that concept, they will likely learn the hard way, to the extent that they have NOT already learned over the past 10 years.. and we cannot really blame them for the past 10 years if they are ONLY recently learning about bitcoin, which truly might be the case with some of them.

[thecodebear]

My BTC investment approach surely does not attempt to rely on any kind of short term BTC price predictions, and so in that regard, I like to believe that I am prepared for either price direction and even irrationality contained in some of the extremes, while at the same time, my underlying presumption remains that in the medium to long term, at least in terms of my own timeline considerations BTC prices are likely to go up... and of course, investment approaches are going to differ from person to person, and also in regards to whether s/he is in a BTC accumulation stage, maintenance stage or a liquidation stage - or some transition between those stages, which is also possible for people who are seriously attempting to tailor their BTC investment approach to their own circumstances that include their cash flow, other investments, views about bitcoin as compared with other investments, timeline, risk tolerance and skills and time that can be dedicated to learning and playing around with their investment(s)...

Yeah short term is impossible to predict. I just wanted to load up at the bottom so I had a bunch of bitcoin for the future. I had no idea if I would know the bottom when it hit, but when it hit I knew it with zero doubts. So that was nice!

I only deal with short term cuz after I was done buying my long term coin at the bottom I loaded up last spring on a little bitcoin for short term trading to try to bring in some money from bitcoin here and there while i wait for years with the main store of my bitcoin. And of course short term is a a total crapshoot with no way of guessing what it will do from day to day or week to week or even month to month.

But long term I have no doubt price is going up. Now the goal for me is just getting out relatively near the top of this cycle, in what I presume will be in like two years, so I can then wait another year or so and get in near the bottom all over again. The shorter term ups and downs within a market cycle don't really matter, like the shot to almost $14k then down to under $7k don't concern me one bit.

[JayJuanGee]

My BTC investment approach surely does not attempt to rely on any kind of short term BTC price predictions, and so in that regard, I like to believe that I am prepared for either price direction and even irrationality contained in some of the extremes, while at the same time, my underlying presumption remains that in the medium to long term, at least in terms of my own timeline considerations BTC prices are likely to go up... and of course, investment approaches are going to differ from person to person, and also in regards to whether s/he is in a BTC accumulation stage, maintenance stage or a liquidation stage - or some transition between those stages, which is also possible for people who are seriously attempting to tailor their BTC investment approach to their own circumstances that include their cash flow, other investments, views about bitcoin as compared with other investments, timeline, risk tolerance and skills and time that can be dedicated to learning and playing around with their investment(s)...

Yeah short term is impossible to predict. I just wanted to load up at the bottom so I had a bunch of bitcoin for the future. I had no idea if I would know the bottom when it hit, but when it hit I knew it with zero doubts. So that was nice!

I only deal with short term cuz after I was done buying my long term coin at the bottom I loaded up last spring on a little bitcoin for short term trading to try to bring in some money from bitcoin here and there while i wait for years with the main store of my bitcoin. And of course short term is a a total crapshoot with no way of guessing what it will do from day to day or week to week or even month to month.

But long term I have no doubt price is going up. Now the goal for me is just getting out relatively near the top of this cycle, in what I presume will be in like two years, so I can then wait another year or so and get in near the bottom all over again. The shorter term ups and downs within a market cycle don't really matter, like the shot to almost $14k then down to under $7k don't concern me one bit.

It could be that we are saying a lot of similar things, but I am just in a different stage of my investment career.. perhaps...  We also might have differences in the way we that we express some of the matters, in part, based on our differing stages of our investment into bitcoin.   

When I got into bitcoin in late 2013 (mostly starting at the top of that $1,163 price run), I started my investing into BTC with a dollar cost averaging approach (with a bit of a font loading attempt), and initially, I had a 6 month budget that I had allocated to bitcoin in order to follow such a beginning strategy to invest into BTC, then I expanded that investing into BTC timeline for another 6 months while studying bitcoin and figuring out ways that I was going to want to tweak my approach, if needed - or even to change my mind about the whole thing, along the way, if needed.

So, I have always considered bitcoin to be tending towards a long-term investment, unless some circumstances were to come about to change my thinking, but of course, since part of my initial goal was to attempt to learn about bitcoin along the way, my long-ish term thinking regarding the whole project has become even more resolute with the passage of time and my BTC strategies that were attempted to be tailored to my view of the matter, how my goals had been reached along the way and my learning more and more about BTC along the way, too.

By the way, in the beginning of my BTC investment, I would have considered long term to be at least 2 years, but now I think that bitcoin is much more of a solid investment, and newbies should not need to fret about considering their BTC investment plans to be a minimum of 4 years or even longer.

In my particular circumstances, mostly by the end of 2014, i had reached my initial BTC accumulation goal of putting about 10% of my quasi-liquid investment value into bitcoin.. So I considered in 2015 and 2016 i had transitioned into a bit more of a hybrid of an accumulation and maintenance mode.  I still largely consider myself to be in a maintenance mode, and I am thinking about entering into a kind of liquidation mode in the coming years.. but really, my liquidation mode is largely just continuing to mostly HODL BTC and to cash out 1% of the value per quarter in a kind of perpetuity status as long as the price stays above $5k.. of course, if there were to be some signs that my life might not be continuing into a longer time frame, then I would likely decide to increase my liquidation amounts in some kind of a way that I considered to be meaningful to my own personal circumstances.

So, anyhow, I consider that my BTC plan is not really materially affected by shorter term bitcoin price movement, but I am not sure if I would be inspired to shave off more bitcoin in the event that the BTC price were to shoot up to $100k in 6 months or some other quick and tempting move in BTC's price..

It surely would be tempting to change my overall BTC strategy based on such circumstances if they were to occur, even though I don't really consider that large sales of my BTC holdings are necessary in terms of my own ongoing investment thesis and the level of value that I have already achieved including my other investments.

Since about late 2015, I began to employ strategies that involve selling relatively small amounts of BTC as the price goes up and to use that sales money to buy back BTC as the price goes down, which largely entails approximately a sale of 1% of my BTC stash value for every 10% that the price goes up, and that is meant to create some downside
BTC price insurance. 

In late 2015, I had considered that I might end up swelling large portions of my BTC stash in the event that BTC prices 10x or more my initial investment; however, when BTC prices went above $2k to $3k in mid 2017, I reconsidered my initial plans in part because I could see that merely shaving off 1% per every 10% rise was already causing me to have way more fiat than I needed, so for personal comfort reasons, I had revised my BTC selling off ideas to reduce the amounts of my BTC selling - even if BTC prices went shooting up... and surely in late 2017, we saw that BTC prices did have the ability to go shooting way up which would have previously triggered my selling off of higher amounts.. which I had revised myself out of such an approach.

I remain comfortable with sticking with my approach, which so far does not really have any significantly large selling off of BTC amounts, and I remain fine (psychologically and financially) with just hanging onto vast amounts of my BTC no matter the price and even to maintain 80% to 90% of my stash, even if BTC prices were to shoot up to $100k or more or some other ungodly amount... I am way comfortable enough, already... even if BTC prices were to remain flat... and of course, I have already authorized myself to be able to sell 1% per quarter as long as prices remain over $5k.. and I have not even started to employ withdrawals based on that system.. and maybe even 2-5 years later, if I were to start such ongoing 1% quarterly withdrawals, my BTC holdings seem to be good enough to just tentatively plan such a strategy.

[sgbett]

Wow you guys have been busy

My thesis is much more simple! Once again massive thanks to the El Duderino aka mic-man, the artist formerly know as micgoossens for running another quarterly prediction thread!

This is absolutely diamond information that captures the sentiment of the group, with a sample size of just over 200 its not bad at all.

What we see this round is...

Min   3125
Max   37025
Mean   11385
Std Dev   4910
Median   10650

This tells me that forum sentiment is bullish as ever with the average guess ~44% higher than the current price.

So, with that in mind - who thinks this is the bottom?

(protip: its not the bottom until everyone is on board the bear bus!)

[Febo]

This tells me that forum sentiment is bullish as ever with the average guess ~44% higher than the current price.

They are bullish about the hype that will halving bring. You know the soup is hottest as soon as is cooked. Who believes there will be no hype in April or/and May is wrong. Also who believes price will not return to pre April values in June is most likely also wrong.

[JayJuanGee]

This tells me that forum sentiment is bullish as ever with the average guess ~44% higher than the current price.

They are bullish about the hype that will halving bring. You know the soup is hottest as soon as is cooked. Who believes there will be no hype in April or/and May is wrong. Also who believes price will not return to pre April values in June is most likely also wrong.

The way this is playing out, Bears are going to be lucky to get anything below $6,424, but I will concede that $6,424 is more likely than below $5,500, which is going to require a considerable amount of luck and maybe the pumpening of a lot of cash into BTC to cause it to drop and run the risk of losing all of it.. So, even odds of below $5,500 or below seem quite low, even zooming out to later in this year.

Time will tell for any of this, so hopefully, there is investment going on for either price direction, especially UP... since there has not been quite any investment that has been so great as bitcoin.

Remember Tim Draper's long term bet in the $600s on the 30k-ish silk road coins in 2014?  He was considered a fool for nearly two years before his coins went into profits, so a bit of long term thinking would likely have better results in hedging towards betting on UP rather than pie in the sky ideas that we have to have "down before up," and a lot of the chartalists seem to get caught on these kinds of "down before up" ideas and frequently have gotten REKKT in bitcoin's historical performance with such ideas, including missing some of the opportunity costs that come with NOT having sufficient UP preparations.

[sgbett]

OOF, quite a nice little jump there for BTC... can it break out of that channel.... its having a good go!

[Wexlike]

OOF, quite a nice little jump there for BTC... can it break out of that channel.... its having a good go!

And the whole crypto world is watching 

[tmfp]

OOF, quite a nice little jump there for BTC... can it break out of that channel.... its having a good go!

And the whole crypto world is watching 

Yeah, not going down the "the next <insert x time period> is crucial" route, but a break out of that channel towards five figures and becoming short term overbought, so then retracing and confirming $8500ish as support would, for me, change the whole picture and be very bullish.

[Bossian]

OOF, quite a nice little jump there for BTC... can it break out of that channel.... its having a good go!

And the whole crypto world is watching 

Yeah, not going down the "the next <insert x time period> is crucial" route, but a break out of that channel towards five figures and becoming short term overbought, so then retracing and confirming $8500ish as support would, for me, change the whole picture and be very bullish.

The channel above looks nice but it could also be misleading.

10.5k is the key price IMO. Major support. Two major prices: 6.4k on the bottom and 10.5k as a major resistance. If we break the channel above until (let's say) 9.3k, and go down again, then it's still a lower high than the previous high of November, which would mean the trend is still bearish. In my opinion it still looks like a fake out, I think we still see 9k soon (breaking the channel) yet won't see 10k again this year but we should go down to 5k at some stage (second semester).

Just my opinion, do your own research.

[Bossian]

The channel you posted is officially broken, as we saw 8.8k few hours ago...
(almost 8.9k I think).





Still the channel clearly shows that the previous lower high was around 10k, therefore it is crucial to go above 10k to break the bearish trend.
In my opinion the overall trend is still a downtrend until we see 10.5k again. That won't be easy.


Short term looking very nice though:





By the way in this thread I was recommending to buy at 6.7k and sell at 9k, we are almost there: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5204344.msg53174178#msg53174178

[sgbett]

The channel you posted is officially broken, as we saw 8.8k few hours ago...
(almost 8.9k I think).





Still the channel clearly shows that the previous lower high was around 10k, therefore it is crucial to go above 10k to break the bearish trend.
In my opinion the overall trend is still a downtrend until we see 10.5k again. That won't be easy.


Short term looking very nice though:

haha yesterday was quite the anomaly BSV leading the entire market higher!? Crazy times.

By the way in this thread I was recommending to buy at 6.7k and sell at 9k, we are almost there: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5204344.msg53174178#msg53174178

nice call!

[exstasie]

Still the channel clearly shows that the previous lower high was around 10k, therefore it is crucial to go above 10k to break the bearish trend.
In my opinion the overall trend is still a downtrend until we see 10.5k again. That won't be easy.

Yes, breaking the descending channel is just another baby step towards confirming the end of the bear market. I try not to put too much emphasis on diagonal lines. The strongest support and resistance is always horizontal.

The market needs to break above this October pivot to form a first higher high on the weekly chart. As such, I expect bears to make a stand before we get there to keep this structure intact:



For the record, I strongly believe now that $6,000s was "the bottom." Breaking above the $10,350 (Bitstamp) pivot will take time though.