Sorry, but I don't see how any of your points proves that this was the best thing ever happened to Bitcoin. I see it as a pretty bad thing, because this bull run was shorter and smaller in terms of relative gains, compared to the previous bull cycles,
Huh? You are presuming a lot hatshepsut93, if you believe that a 53% correction means that we have fallen out of the bull run. Sure, it could be the case that $64,895 (on April 13 - merely 7 weeks ago) was the top for this particular bull cycle, but think about the matter a wee bit more before presuming that the bull cycle is over...
which means that the rate of Bitcoin's price growth could be slowing down.
again.... "huh?" What the fuck you talking about?
We had a BTC price run from $10k-ish in the beginning of September to nearly $65k in the middle of April, and so that is a 6.5x BTC price appreciation for that period.
Even if we look at our current BTC price of about $37k as I type this post, that is still about a 3.7x price rise from merely 9 months ago...
Again, you seem to be presuming that the price run is over, merely because we are in the midst of a correction that brought us down 53% from $64,895 to $30,066 and now we are currently at about a 43% distance from getting back to the top..
By the way, I will concede with any kind of overall point that BTC's price growth is slowing down and is likely to slow down because with any new asset class, it is going to be way easier to attain astronomical and exponential growth in the earliest days of its price discovery, so inevitably there is going to be truth to claims that assets that mature more and more are not going to be able to sustain their earlier levels of exponential price appreciation. Nonetheless, there remains a whole hell of a lot of prematurity in your presumption that this particular bull run is over.
By the way, there are also a lot of ways to attempt to measure exponential price rise periods, so we could end up getting quite a bit of swing in the numbers merely from making choices regarding how to measure the various price rise periods. One of my personal favorite ways to attempt to make comparisons would be to describe the BTC price rises within a context of the four-year cycles, and then instead of looking at the extremes of the cycle to attempt to look at a round about number to figure out a base jumping off point for the beginning of the bull cycle, which may well not be known until the cycle is allowed to play out for a while.. so even with that we can get some round about numbers in terms of attempting to put our run cycle into context in terms of how the four years seems to be playing out.
So for example our 2017 BTC price run largely seemed to have started from mid-to-late 2015 with a base starting rate of around $250. So the $19,666 top would have been about a 78x price increase. The 2013 run to $1,163 did start from sub $10 in 2012, but we could just round it up to $10 to assert that the price rise was at least 116x. So, we already see a decrease in the exponential price rises (at least looking at the tippity top price for that run) for each of those 4 year periods.
It seems to me that if we take our current period, reasonable assertions can be made that our price foundation would be around $4,200 from April 2019.. Yeah, of course, you can use other numbers, but I believe that there is a decent amount of BTC price performance to show $4,200-ish as a decent and fair jumping off point for this particular bull run that we are in and attempts to consider whether the bull run might be over and how much this particular bull run might have shrunk in size from previous bullruns to consider if there might be some concerns about the size (presuming that it is over). So, if $64,895 ends up being the top, then that would be about a 15.5x price appreciation.. which surely is quite a bit lower than the previous ones that were in the ballpark of 116x and 78x respectively.
Personally, I believe that the potential magnitude of the drop of the exponential peak for this period to a measly 15.5x lends more support to theories that the bull run is not over yet rather than presuming that BTC's grown is dramatically shrinking - especially since it also seems way too premature to proclaim that $64,895 is the top for this run. and furthermore, if some people seem to be very inclined to rush to judgement rather than looking at actual charts showing BTC past performance, there are reasonable arguments that could be made regarding our current cycle to play out as a kind of double top scenario that somewhat resembles the 2013 double top. Sure, it may well not play out exactly the same, and no one should really expect such a current cycle to play out with any kind of exactness because there are a lot of dynamics in bitcoin that are different now as compared to 2013 - even if some of the overriding supply halvening principles (that help to give more credence to 4 year cycles) remain intact in bitcoin's design.
So, if we look at 2013 more closely we see that it achieved 116x through two cycles and the first cycle to around $263 in April, would have constituted a 26x increase in the early stages of the price rise, and then a pretty BIG ASS price drop down to $70--ish and then a decently long period that brought questions to whether the price run was over, yet... and surely later in the year the run began to show signs of recovery, and once the BTC price started getting close to the $263 top from April, it ended up rising quite quickly after that to reach the $1,163 blow off top.
So, bitcoin's increasing adoption does take away from blow off tops being so short and so short lived and even the extremes of down seem to take longer to play out, even though they can surely feel like they are happening quickly and that they are "unprecedented" while they are happening, including our BTC price drop from supra $50k to $30,066 which took over a week to play out even while the drop from supra $40k to $30,066 took less than a day to play out.
Though it's a pretty expected thing, because at this point almost everyone is aware of Bitcoin
You have a lot of seemingly nonsensical presumptions built into your various assessments of the state of BTC, hatshepsut93. Your assertion that almost everyone is aware of bitcoin is almost complete bullshit.
Sure there are a lot of people who are aware of bitcoin because they heard the word "bitcoin." But so many people do not even know what bitcoin is, including a lot of people who buy bitcoin.
Anyhow, you can presume all that you like about bitcoin being mature or largely adopted because you are wanting to suggest that its price peaks are flattening - including that either $64,895 is the top or pretty damned close to the top.
We will find out, won't we?
To me there seems to be a whole hell of a lot of more potential UPpity for this particular cycle, but surely further UPpity is far from guaranteed....
On an individual level, each of us is responsible for our own level of preparedness for both UP and DOWN scenarios.. as well as flat scenarios (which seems to be the least likely of the bunch)...
Does the future of Bitcoin depend on how banks will position themselves against cryptocurrencies? Like many others, I do not like the fact that banks will come into a legal position to offer all these services and that in the end we have a paradoxical situation in which people use banks to buy and store cryptocurrencies in their custodial service. Maybe that makes sense with most centralized cryptocurrencies, but I would never trust a bank to be my crypto wallet, especially with Bitcoin.
I completely understand what you're saying, but if adoption is the goal, it's better to have Bitcoin within reach of more people. People using custodial services when it's completely unnecessary certainly is a cause of concern, but I feel like this is an easier problem to solve than lack of adoption. I see it as kind of like how people are much more aware of what to put and not to put on social media nowadays vs. a decade ago -- people are going to start talking about it, and at least a decent portion will listen.
I dislike that banks will be in a position of power in this scenario, but since it's always been open for use to
everyone, it's not like we can stop them if they want to get involved anyway. All we can really do is speak with our own wallets and encourage other people to do the same. Either way, I personally believe getting more people involved = better.
When we conceive of the various entrants, users of bitcoin and services offered, it seems a bit problematic to be framing the matter in terms of what we might want or not want because bitcoin is designed in such a way that there is no control over who uses it or does not use it.. or whether it is adopted or not.
Sure, there are incentives built into bitcoin that seem to suggest that it could be a good idea to get some bitcoin in case it catches on, and then once you have the bitcoin, then you have options concerning whether you use one service or another that is provided by someone else or if you try to lessen your reliance on going through third party services.
Of course, there are peeps out there who are saying that "adoption is our goal" but in the end, bitcoin does not really need any marketers - even though, surely it does not hurt to have people becoming more and more aware of bitcoin with the passage of time, and some of them figure out that "it might be good for me to get some of this bitcoin thingie-ma-jiggie in case it might catch on." hahahaha
Who exactly do you mean when you say "almost everyone is aware of Bitcoin"? Are they regular investors in stocks, gold, bonds or similar things - or do you think most people in the world generally know about BTC?
Hearing about something, knowing something about something, and understanding something are completely different things.
Even in 2017 a lot of people didn't know what Bitcoin was, but now regular people see it in on their news regularly, because mainstream media reports about big movements or some interesting stories related to it.
Just because they might hear the word from time to time or see some news reports on it does not really mean that they know shit about it. Furthermore, you can ask some of these nocoiners who have heard about bitcoin and quickly find out they hardly know shit about it, even if they had heard the word several times.
Of course there's still a huge room for adoption, but the novelty factor is not the same as before.
It's going to become pretty damned novel once some of these no coiners actually set up an account and buy some bitcoin.. and when that happens, some of them are going to become way more enlightened in terms of going to be like.. "holy shit!!!! I did not know about this thingie-ma-jiggie that is be called "the bitcoins," previously." So of course there is a difference between passively hearing about something and coming around to understand it on a deeper level.
I think you countered your own counter argument there though. Bull runs, are expected somewhat to slow down, in terms of the amount of people buying in, and the longevity of them. In theory, as more people invest in Bitcoin, the more it should become stable. the longer, and the closer we get to the limit it shouldn't be so volatile. This is helped by the block rewards being reduced as time goes on.
From a point of view of hodler, it would have been better if the magnitude of bull cycles slowed down later. It's still so volatile that most people aren't ready to use it as a currency, so why not hope for bigger bull runs while we're at it?
Seems quite inevitable that with something like money or an asset class like bitcoin, then greater and greater adoption would be causing less and less volatility, in part because it is going to take more and more capital to move the price one direction or another. I doubt that bitcoin gives any shits about what you "hope for", so one of the better strategies is to attempt to figure out how to prepare yourself for whatever might happen rather than hoping for something that may or may not happen.
