First things first...
Goose..you are a pillar of this community. Your constant bullishness, enthusiasm and amazing generosity are the epitome of what being 'gentlemen' is all about imho.
Thank you very much.
A succinct post theymos...its appreciated methinks. I highlighted a particularly poignant sentence for me. This is the way.
My ability to predict the price isn't great at the best of times, but I've been especially uncertain lately. There are strong bearish forces:
- Institutional money cares a lot about ESG virtue signalling, and I think that the "Bitcoin is not ESG" meme will grow, though I'm not sure to what extent.
- Any regulatory news is much more likely to be bad than good, and could be
very bad. Even just pressure on eg. Robinhood to reduce the "gamification" of investing could hurt BTC to some extent.
- BTC tends to be correlated with high-risk things (eg. TSLA shares), and these have been falling for a variety of reasons.
- Interest rates may rise, which makes BTC less attractive because there's less easy money floating around, the far-future prospect of "BTC takes over the world" gets discounted to a lower present value, safer returns are possible elsewhere, etc.
- A lot of the recent FOMO in all markets may have been due to people being stuck inside, going a bit crazy, with more time and money than usual. This is ending.
- There's a ton of money held by old hodlers. A lot of these will be tempted to at least incrementally sell as the price goes higher, and they may especially be tempted to panic sell if one day they're a multi-millionaire and the next they're worried that they're going to lose everything due to a sharp price drop (ie. panic selling could cause a small correction to turn into a bloodbath). On top of that, there is an absolutely huge amount of unrealized capital gains held by US Bitcoiners who will want to realize these gains before any significant capital gains tax increases. In fact, Bitcoin is probably the single traded asset that you'd expect to be
most affected by Biden's proposed capital gains tax increase. (I predict that the capital gains tax will increase to 30% for $1M+, non-retroactive: less than Biden's proposal, but still enough of an increase to make realizing your gains this year very attractive.)
- A lot of the money in BTC is pure speculation: the kind of people who see absolutely no difference between DOGE and BTC, for example, and would be happy to pile onto anything that will get them to the moon ASAP. This money is easy-come, easy-go.
But there are also strong bullish forces:
- Institutional money
really wants to get into BTC, viewing it as a unique new asset class. This is only one small bullet point in my list, but the interest from large piles of money to shift some of it into BTC is
immense.
- Huge companies are now holding BTC and even accepting it for goods/services. If companies actually started trading in BTC instead of USD, that'd be extremely bullish.
- Crypto trading is a large, integral component of retail trading now, to an extent that I think has not been fully realized by the market. Many people would rather give up stock trading than crypto trading, if they had to choose. Paypal, Robinhood, and even traditional brokerage firms will expand their BTC offerings. The more
accessible BTC buying gets, the higher the price is likely to go.
- The "interest rates" offered by eg. BlockFi are extremely attractive, and I think that more companies such as Robinhood will soon offer similar things.
- There's clearly strong "buy the dip" support from somewhere, since it's seemed several times that the price wanted to crash, but it was stopped.
- Even though I listed it as a possible bearish factor, I don't actually think that interest rates will move substantially higher. In fact, I could see the US entering something of a recession in fall due to a "hangover" from the ridiculous fiscal and monetary stimulus. Low growth = low rates and a search for growth in more speculative areas like BTC. And there's still an unbelievable amount of fiat floating around, looking for somewhere to go.
- In addition to being viewed as an aggressive speculative asset, BTC can also be viewed as defensive: similar to gold, it's a hedge against the fiat world falling apart. The money-printing over the last year has made it plain to more and more people that fiat is a joke, and it's likely IMO that before the year is over there will be some serious problems with the fiat economy.
By the end of the year, both $25k and $100k are about equally believable IMO...
BTC has seemed pretty comfy in the $50k-$60k range. It tends to get pushed up rapidly whenever there are big drops. However, over the next few months I'm a little more fundamentally bearish than bullish, and technically I also get the sense that there's more downward pressure than upward pressure. IMO, until ~fall we're most likely to be going up and down in a wide range with a slight negative slope. Something like this (I realize that this is not proper technical analysis:
I'm drawing the lines where they feel right to me, not based on proven support/resistance or any math):
For now there is upward pressure whenever it goes below $50k, but this
could be fully broken by Jun 21. I guess
$48,777.
and for the rest of you swabbies.. Animals..one and all.
Carry on.
