As we approach ATH what is different compared to 2017?

[figmentofmyass]

i saw an interesting article the other day about the role bitcoin is playing in online poker. i wonder how big of an effect this has on the market:

In a Nov. 19 report from Bloomberg, the CEO behind Winning Poker Network, or WPN, said that up to 95% of poker players are currently requesting to be paid in Bitcoin.

“We are constantly having to go out and buy Bitcoin — lots,” said Nagy. He estimated that even before this recent price surge, the WPN was paying out more than $100 million in BTC every month, roughly 60% of all transactions on the network. Extrapolated to the 95% of payouts Nagy reports is currently occurring, and assuming the same volume, that would equate to roughly $158 million in Bitcoin each month.

According to Nagy, the majority of customers playing poker on the network reside in the United States, which may help explain their preference for crypto as a medium of exchange given that online gambling is legal in only 11 out of 50 states.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/poker-network-now-gives-95-of-payouts-in-bitcoin-around-160m-monthly

The ICO boom was a big factor in the last crypto bull run, but the majority of that was hype with no substance. DeFi is the ETH based thing that will help drive this bull run, and it is much more real than ICOs because its offering actual financial products rather than hype based on ideas without any real market presence. DeFi should survive long term and will have a far larger impact on crypto as a whole than ICOs did.

just like ICOs, the whole space already feels saturated and plagued by constant scams. DEXs have been inundated by scam tokens. i'm also not completely sold on the future use cases. it's all about yield farming and collateral backed lending. i just don't know how big that market is really gonna be in the future.

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[Stedsm]

The speed

Yeah, it took years for BTC to go from 0 to 20k and this time, it happened in just 3 years timespan.

Stability

While we talked about the speed, we also need to see how things went in through timings - various events happened which gave boost to the Bitcoin price rather than just making it look completely speculative as before. So stable growth has been seen this time.

Scalability

Umm, I know BTC is still trying to get much better resources in order to keep/cope up with the market's demands and let the things go smooth, and I'm a happy Bitcoiner at the moment (except when we see fees going high). It's not like old days when we need to wait days before our transactions got confirmed even after paying basic necessary fees (while fee spikes took place).

Adoption

The event of Corona has taught us all a lesson that we can't rely on fiat scam because it is scam money and we need to get something in which we can invest something/everything and still be rest assured that one day we'll have it a lot more times than what it used to be. I'm now seeing big names challenging each other and betting on Bitcoin to be the one and only global currency, while many analysts have also predicted 20-50x of the current price of BTC. And in between that, the level of massive institutional and average people's adoption of BTC has increased to enormous levels and once again, Google is being flooded with BTC searches more than anything (even porn).  

Less followers

Well, don't get confused by the title, it's for the alts. Yeah, this rally isn't allowing shit coins to rise at any cost and they'll definitely not rise unless some bulls want to play with their money and make more money through innocent investors.

DeFi

Last but not the least, DeFi. This came and everything changed. I mean, even BTC is decentralized money man, who controls it? The one who has it but also hold the private key of that address. Okay, now about DeFi, I believe that the ego of BTC got hurt when it saw some DeFi named YFI partying hard with other DeFi friends (alts) and then BTC decided to show how it feels when BTC is on weed.   <= Everything rolls like this.

[LUCKMCFLY]

Undoubtedly, what is different are all events in the world, the situations are very different, in addition, when millionaire portfolios are reviewed at 100-1000 BTC they continue to maintain 61-62% https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html, of course this is not a guarantee that it is an indicator, but for 2017-2018 it reached almost 80%, there is still a lot to continue growing in price.

[magneto]

I think that what is different isn't actually bitcoin itself, but rather the wider economic environment that we find ourselves in.

We can split these into two main factors:

1. COVID has seen a great deal of QE around the globe and that is likely to spark more hawkish investors to seek somewhere to park their funds due to their belief of currency debasement. Bitcoin is the obvious safe-haven asset as gold continues to decline in popularity.

2. Institutional investors continue to flood the BTC market. We've seen this with even bigger name players than 2017, with Blackrock, Paypal etc.

Though, I think that it is likely BTC will not see percentage gains anywhere near the levels of 2017 simply because of the size of the market. The good thing is that market volatility will decrease substantially.

[adaseb]

The biggest difference now I would say is that this rally (except for the last 2 days) has been mostly led by the spot market instead of the derivative market. Usually arbitrageurs keep the price balanced between both, however there are times when there is a delta in the futures pricing. Hence why the funding rate exists.

The funding rate has been mostly flat during the last few months, very different from 2017 which was always like >0.10% per 8 hours. So back then, most people were leverage trading and bring BTCUSD price up. If someone has 1 BTC, they can buy up to 100 BTC worth rather than a spot trader who can only do 1:1 or something like 1:3 with regular margin.

The issue with high leverage positions is that we would get crazy $1000 red candles within a few minutes due to massive liquidations. So far we haven't experienced this yet. The markets are more stable and liquid than 2017.

[error08]

~
Also the fact that we're not even in the 2017 stage of the market cycle now. We're in the 2016 stage. The real bull run hasn't even begun, and is likely 3-6 months from even starting.

I think the most exciting thing about Bitcoin price possibilities at this point is that institutional investment as of late is driving this price surge back to nearly last market cycle's peak. This is exciting because institutional investment is still absolutely TINY! It's barely even started and it's already driven the price back to nearly the ATH. It is easy to see institutional investment growing 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x this decade from where it is now - taking a more long term view than just the rest of this market cycle, but even just in the next year or two before the next long term peak its easy to imagine that retail investment could go up several times over by then. Combine this with the fact that the retail frenzy hasn't even begun yet, well its not hard to imagine the price breaking $100k in the next year or two.

Yeah, that explains what's happening in the Bitcoin market at the moment. Institutional investors greatly affect the market, however we don't know for how long they plan to stay in the market, whether they want to accumulate bitcoin as a reserve asset for a long term or as a speculative asset to sell at the peak. Meanwhile, we can expect Bitcoin to reach a higher price until the time comes to reveal their plans in the future.

[Lucius]

i saw an interesting article the other day about the role bitcoin is playing in online poker. i wonder how big of an effect this has on the market:

Very interesting, poker players seem to be quite crypto oriented, or think that in this way they may be able to hide their winnings maybe? In any case, $158 million in BTC every month is almost $1.9 billion a year, which means that we have another very important player who is constantly buying BTC on the market. Everyone seems to have become interested in BTC because we have small family businesses switching their fiat to BTC, all the way to JPMorgan as the largest investment bank in the US advising investing in BTC.

[noorman0]

We have reached the bitcoin ATH 3 days ago.
The difference is that the USD is slightly higher against our currency compared to 2017, so to experience the ATH this time we don't have to wait until it hits 20k. When bitcoin hits 20k, it will be the new ATH for some countries.

source: https://indodax.com/chart/BTCIDR

However, the value of the USD has weakened since the US election. I am worried that when the USD strengthens again, it will reverse the price of bitcoin.

source: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=IDR&view=1Y

[kotajikikox]

We have reached the bitcoin ATH 3 days ago.
The difference is that the USD is slightly higher against our currency compared to 2017, so to experience the ATH this time we don't have to wait until it hits 20k. When bitcoin hits 20k, it will be the new ATH for some countries.

source: https://indodax.com/chart/BTCIDR

If only the value of Dollar is not this junk now Yeah the new ATH has been declared i'm sure but since we are relying on the value of bitcoin conversion to Dollar so the news has been denied and not recorded as Market cap has no Data of this.

However, the value of the USD has weakened since the US election. I am worried that when the USD strengthens again, it will reverse the price of bitcoin.

source: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=IDR&view=1Y

Actually the USD Value starts weakening even when the election was not in place.But anyway maybe things will Go good once Trump accepts and concede or the Claims of cheating will be proven.

[Harlot]

Considerably cheaper transactions fees are also notable during this kind of rounds, from what I remember in 2017 you will see that a lot of companies like Steam pulled out from accepting Bitcoin when they saw that the transaction fees are unreasonably high, this is when both SegWit and Lightning Network is not helping the Blockchain on carrying the stress. Well the scalability of Bitcoin is very good right now and I think it will help us when it comes to translating it more into demand.

[Gozie51]

I think the difference is that more adopters are coming in. PayPal is using bitcoin, institutional bodies are coming in and this means more growth to the bitcoin. The difference again is that the hype for 2017 was expected because at that time nothing was negative to bitcoin except for the bubble stuff. This time, it wasn't expected because covid-19 and economic challenge.

[coin-investor]

We can't simply say that prices will keep on increasing once it reaches new ATH because there are lot of people are waiting to sell their bitcoin for very long who bought at expensive price so if there something waiting for us then it may trigger the chain reaction of panic selling.

There are still people who will ride the FOMO, Bitcoin price is not going to end after it surpasses the last all-time high, it's not the real target, the real target is the highest it can go, and the market has matured, investors are buying because they believe it's going to be very much different from the last one, because back then people are not yet ready, but we are now.

[beerlover]

First of all 150 million per month on bitcoin doesn't seem realistic, sure they can claim that but with few companies like that and we would have been at $20k looong ago and would be higher.

However I suppose that is just people getting bitcoin and also when they are paid in bitcoin they just end up selling it back and getting cash instead, makes it easier to be paid bitcoin from a casino instead of cash so you do not have to explain to your bank that you gambled for that money and create more problems, but if you just cash out bitcoin you could say you invested early and you were lucky.

Secondly the different thing compared to 2017 is that there are ton of more new people and a lot of new institutional investors that makes bitcoin a lot more stronger and resistant to fall down.

[exstasie]

The biggest difference now I would say is that this rally (except for the last 2 days) has been mostly led by the spot market instead of the derivative market. Usually arbitrageurs keep the price balanced between both, however there are times when there is a delta in the futures pricing. Hence why the funding rate exists.

The funding rate has been mostly flat during the last few months, very different from 2017 which was always like >0.10% per 8 hours. So back then, most people were leverage trading and bring BTCUSD price up.

You're talking about after price was trading above the 2013 ATH. In other words, during the bubble stage. We haven't reached that point yet. In 2016, there was also significantly more fear in the market than in 2017. I think that speaks to what is happening today to some degree.

I have also begun paying more attention to Binance Futures than Bitmex. Volume wise, Binance is more important now and Binance funding rates have been consistently more bullish than Bitmex too.

I disagree that a high futures premium or high swap funding rates implies that derivatives must have been leading spot. It just implies that derivative traders were very bullish at those times.

[Fundamentals Of]

The difference is that we are older now, got more experience, more lessons learned from the past, more mature so to speak, etc. The market now is much wider. The players are bigger in number as compared in 2017. The number of big time investors are now much higher today compared in the past. That is probably the fruits of Bitcoin now playing in the mainstream field, now openly accepted even by governments and banks. Famous traditional investors and hedge fund managers are now beginning to appreciate Bitcoin and invest in it. Large companies are now getting into Bitcoin as well.

[BuNga_cute]

The price increase in 2017 was due to FOMO, we can see on the trading chart the increase was too fast in 2017.
So in the end there was a massive dump, because many investors want instant profit. In contrast to the current
price increase in this year, the fundamentals are stronger. And also it rises slowly and there is no FUD. Of the investors
there are also many rich people and large companies involved. So based on my analysis, most of the investors this year
are long-term investments. So there is very little chance of a dump happen.

[maydna]

The difference is that we are older now, got more experience, more lessons learned from the past, more mature so to speak, etc. The market now is much wider. The players are bigger in number as compared in 2017. The number of big time investors are now much higher today compared in the past. That is probably the fruits of Bitcoin now playing in the mainstream field, now openly accepted even by governments and banks. Famous traditional investors and hedge fund managers are now beginning to appreciate Bitcoin and invest in it. Large companies are now getting into Bitcoin as well.

I guess that is because the adoption process happens in many places, which will be different from 2017. Bitcoin price will not be the same from time to time, and if there are more investors come to the bitcoin, that can trigger the price to increase because they want to buy bitcoin at the current price. Bitcoin will become mainstream sooner or later, while people are still searching for a new source of income, making bitcoin more popular among the people. Besides that, people will see that bitcoin is not a scam because, from bitcoin, they see many people are really making money, which they also want to get.

[el kaka22]

The biggest difference is peoples perspective and that is quite important. Think about it, before 2017 we were just small some sort of game money in many mainstream media that really didn't deserve any attention at all. After the 2017 peak (or even during) we became something huge but it became just "some people got super rich over night" type of story and nothing more than that according to media.

Nowadays for the past 1 or 2 years, we have grown to be something that is very valuable towards not just regular people but for everyone involved like big companies and so forth as well. Even crypto related companies grew to be huge as well. So right now we have a stronger base and community, our community is not just liberal anarchists anymore, it is everyone and keeps growing every day.

[blckhawk]

I think the difference is that more adopters are coming in. PayPal is using bitcoin, institutional bodies are coming in and this means more growth to the bitcoin. The difference again is that the hype for 2017 was expected because at that time nothing was negative to bitcoin except for the bubble stuff. This time, it wasn't expected because covid-19 and economic challenge.

Indeed because of covid-19 it really hit hard the stock market while the crypto market remains the same that is why several investors choose to move on it. They more likely used it as a safe haven and then eventually understand the capabilities of Crypto. Besides, the adoption was also increasing from government, large companies such as Paypal, and other institutions. The growth speed before was phenomenal and it increases because of FOMO while today's speed growth was slow, not as speedy as we had before but much stronger and perhaps adoption was the cause of this one. Honestly, I kinda like today's growth compared we had before.

[bakasabo]

Imho the difference between ATH in 2017 and current prices are cryptocurrency investors experience. The history repeats and everyone see that after price drop it always recovers. This strengthens trust to cryptocurrency. Year 2017 investors were naïve and came to crypto market on the wave of ICO hype. Now me see more experienced people. DeFi hype ended in summer and now is having its last days. The difference could be also the probability that in 2017 prices were pumped by ICO, and now they are real.