Topic: Calling top at $16500 (Even Newer!: $2483 bottom 19 Feb 2021 MtGox said so!) - page 17. (Read 24307 times)

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...


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!)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.


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.

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).

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

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.



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).



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.

Let me also add: Bitcoin's chief value is *not* the ability to sell it for a higher price. It's value is it utility, and this will be reflected in the fact that the price rise due to s-curve will be much greater than any speculative run-up ever was.

When that happens, it will look like a bubble again (yes there will be an overshoot, maybe $1m per Bitcoin?) but I think it still settles at 6 figures, because adoption will dwarf speculative activity.

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. 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


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

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.

An opportunity to buy cheap Bitcoins?

There were many people who thought they missed a buying opportunity. That opportunity is back, and suddenly everyone turns bearish? Zoom out.

Seems he has tracked latest action as more aggressive, too much energy like that can fail and reverse quite quickly I guess.   His charts are a little busy for my preference but seems a fair take I'll try to find myself also.

I'm only bearish because thats the overall trend, its found neutral a few times and confused people by being positive short term but its not found a proper standing for gains to accumulate like a proper positive market should have.    It can change and just like I cant stand in the way when its got weight to the downside, I hope I dont get in the way when it does finally prove itself more positive.   I was not awake enough in FEB even while noticing a whole month of rising lows, got to be a supporter at some point and change bias if a trader at all.
  Overall I dont see anything that serious, BTC moves further then people expect in both directions.  I was negative on BTC in July and I was way too early really, it does have some weight to bring it around.

He is not an Elliott Wave analyst. He's posted a bunch of updates since then and his analysis hasn't changed. He's still looking at $6,150 for a possible reversal and is expecting downward pressure into next week: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53369008

Fair enough.  I kind of read back about some of sgbett's previous stances to better understand regarding his point of view situation.

So, ultimately merely because he believes that bitcoin is no longer the real bitcoin, the topic of this particular thread has NOT changed to something other than being about bitcoin, as far as I can tell.  And, maybe that is where the Schelling point concepts come to play out?

Of course, anyone can attempt to make certain arguments about bitcoin transitioning to some other status or needing to transition towards a certain status, but that seems to be a topic of another thread - when this one is about bitcoin prices and bitcoin price dynamics, rather than being about "what is bitcoin?" 

I quickly looked at the chart and unfortunately I think it was already invalidated.
Posted in November 25, at the time most analysts were not sure if the ABC correction was a flat or a zigzag, the bullish scenario was the flat ABC but we are mid-December and it's clear the correction is a zigzag, with BTC price going below 6k next year.

If you read between the lines he just means BTC is not Bitcoin anymore, another alt coin is the real Bitcoin (pretty clear from his previous posts) 

Hasn't there been? The market rallied from the low $3,000s to the upper $13,000s. A 350% rise far above the original accumulation range is pretty clearly a "sign of strength" in Wyckoff terms.


From a long term, yearly chart perspective, of course we're still in an uptrend. In terms of pivot highs and lows, it doesn't become a downtrend until we break below the 2015 bottom ~$150.

Anyway, trader sentiment is what really matters. The idea behind capitulation is that "everyone who is going to sell has sold." Permabulls are never going to sell (at least not into a downtrend) so their bullish sentiment isn't important right now.