When do you think BTC will pump again? How long this panic sell can last?
Bitcoin could still reach $20,000 this year if the recovery from the crash is pretty quick. But it could take longer based on the last big crash we saw in 2014. There’s no way to know what will happen this year. We could even see another price drop in Bitcoin before the recovery takes off in the positive direction.
Yes, the similarities with 2014 are strong: a crazy bubble with an ATH that was manifold the previous year's average, a crash, a bull trap, and then a long, agonizing, slow decline for a few years. There was a previous crazy bubble in 2011.
ATH on June 8, 2011: $29 coming from $1 a few months before. Crash down to about half of it, $6.5, on August 6, 2011. Bull trap back to $11.15 a week later, and slow decline to around $2 - $3 for the rest of the year. Next year, 2012, slow rising back to about less than half of the ATH, around $10 - $12. 2013: first crazy run-up to over $100 (even one day, over $200) in April 2013 with peaks over $1000 at the end of the year. New ATH at $1124 on December 4. 2013. Crashing down to less than half of it $522 on December 18. 2013, with bull trap back to $800-$900 in January 2014, followed by slow decline for the rest of the year (about $300 towards the end of 2014), with deep point $199 on January 17, 2015.
Stabilizing during 2015, steady value around $250 until October 2015. Rise from there onward, until boom in December 2017.
I have the impression that the times between bubble bursting is becoming larger, but the pattern is repeating. It has the typical pattern of a speculative bubble, except that usually, speculative bubbles are a one-time phenomenon, and bitcoin has already had 3 successive speculative bubbles. So I guess the next one is for 4 or 5 years from now.
However, the lessons are two-fold. On one hand, many people may realize they are in for a long bear period and may decide to sell now, even if it is to buy back in at the bottom (one year from now or so), some order of magnitude below the ATH ; as such, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People may also realize that bitcoin may bubble again, and that it would be unsafe to sell because one might miss the train. I guess this was already the case after the 2013 bubble, explaining the very slow decline.
But the situation has changed. There's competition. Bitcoin was alone essentially during the two previous bubbles. Now, bitcoin is about 1/3 of crypto, and technically in a bad shape. The driving belief of "money of the future" is also gone. In 2014, you could still talk people in believing they could buy their groceries one day with bitcoin, that's over now... unless the lightning network proves to become a great success, which I personally doubt, but you never know. Bitcoin as the new world currency was still a dream in 2014, it will be much harder to convince people right now.
So it is really an open question whether bitcoin will have had its last bubble, or whether it will bubble on like it did in the past. However, normally, we should have a long bear market ahead.
