Topic: Calling top at $16500 (Even Newer!: $2483 bottom 19 Feb 2021 MtGox said so!) - page 18. (Read 24307 times)

Sounds contradictory just the way you stated it, and of course, not too many people are interested in BIG blocker nonsense or any of that kind of snake oil baloney in a bitcoin thread, and maybe we are getting a bit off the topic if we go into descriptions about what is consensus, which ends up driving the direction of BTC in terms of Schelling point type dynamics.

Of course, community concerns about bitcoin can affect price in terms of adoption and development, yet seems that you started this thread in terms of concerns about price over exuberance and needs to correct that might be more technical analysis basis in terms of whether price momentum is sustainable.  Accordingly, there were a lot of folks calling the bitcoin top starting at about $5k in the last cycle (including myself thinking that the price was not likely to go much above $5k in the last cycle, even though it ended up going 4x higher), so in that regard, sooner or later the ones calling the top were going to be right.

Of course, if fundamentals are weak, and if 4 year fractal theories and stock to flow theories of BTC's price trajectory don't play out, then we would need a different model for trying to anticipate price direction and if we believe that bitcoin retains enough of strength in various network effects in order to retain bullish price performance.

Ultimately it is up to you if you decided that your theories about the direction of bitcoin are deviating a bit too much from what people consider to be bitcoin, which seems to kind of be implied in what you are saying, and no one's got time for that in a bitcoin thread... 

Ah yes I am familiar with the wyckoff stuff. Given that we were around 3xxx in feb, I'd be assuming that the accumulation phase is still in that region given there has not been a take off yet...

I'm not sure everyone is pessimistic (if you look at TA people, possibly, as they see what the charts tell them) if you look at e.g. overall sentiment on the boards here (you only have to look at the post before yours!) people are still sure that there is nothing to see its just a pull back, we are still in an uptrend!

Until those people start to have doubts and capitulate there is a ways to go yet imho.

@JayJuanGee ... I'm still massively bullish on Bitcoin, but I don't see any future for BTC. It's a long story, which nobody is interested in so I won't waste anyone's time

From a Wyckoff cycle point of view, it may not be so bearish. David's analysis puts us deep in Phase D of an accumulation schematic, which suggests a very bullish 2020 to come: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53176663

Given the prevailing trend, things are looking very pessimistic. That's why virtually everyone I see is bearish. That's also how it should feel near the bottom.

I am not sure what you are attempting to suggest because my above discussion attempts to focus ONLY on bitcoin, not the various shitcoins that have hijacked the bitcoin name and turned some of the searching efforts and overall discussions of the concept of bitcoin into a bunch of gobbledy-gook.  There are a whole fucking lot of people who don't actually understand the difference between bitcoin and the various imitation coins or even other variations of shitcoins that have other names, such as ethereum and ripple, too.

Let me see if I can express this in another way.  Long term Dollar cost averaging investing is ONLY going to work in the event that the underlying asset is ultimately trending upwards by the time that an investor chooses to start cashing out.  If the underlying asset continues to trend downwardly, then even if the investor is getting more and more of the asset with the same amount of dollar input on a regular basis, that is not going to fare well when it comes time to attempting to cash out, in the event that the asset does not ultimately go up sufficiently enough in order that the value/price of the underlying asset surpasses the average cost per unit.

So dollar cost averaging should ONLY be used with assets in which the investor believes have an overall price trajectory that is upwards or some possible future opportunities that the price of the underlying asset would go up sufficiently enough that the investor would end up being in profits at the time of cashing out.  Speculation of course, and some crypto assets have stronger fundamentals than others, and in my own opinion, there are not really any that have fundamentals that justify investing into them on a long term basis, like bitcoin has such strong fundamentals that tie into various network effects that are continuing to build on it, as well as the mere foundational fact that bitcoin was actually built in a way that is impervious to attacks (does not mean that attacks from government institutions, financial institutions or even from within cannot happen, but there is a certain level of resilience that is still playing out in bitcoin and no other coin offers, so far).

Personally, I do not assess any other asset in the crypto space, besides bitcoin, as being one that I, personally, would consider investing into, even if the asset has the word bitcoin in its name.  Sure there can be pumpening opportunities with the various scam coin bitcoin imitations but I personally would not feel comfortable sleeping at night with any significant value invested into any of them.  I understand that other people can come to assessments that differ from mine, and that is fine. 

I still will argue that DCA practices are best applied to assets in which the investor has confidence in the longer term upwards price trajectory of such asset.  I would also suggest that the investor is engaging in a different kind of practice (gambling or whatever) rather than DCAing, if the investor does not first attempt to honestly engage in an assessment his/her own perceptions of the long term fundamentals of the underlying assets (and presumably strong long term fundamentals should ultimately positively correlate to long term positive price performance of such asset(s), even if the shorter-term experiences a lot of negative or flat price performance).

Of course, making an assessment of the fundamentals of any asset is subjected to error, and sometimes any persons actual assessment of any asset could change over time.  So, for example, if an investor allocates value into 5 different investments at time A, and considers the investment allocations to be prudently targeted at 40%, 20%, 20%, 15%, 5%, s/he might become more or less bullish on parts of the investment with the passage of time and changes in circumstances, and end up reallocating the assets based on such changes  in assessments. 

The change in the assessment might take an immediate turn that involves an immediate reallocation; however such change in assessment could still take 6 months to 18 months to establish such reallocation that would end up following a kind of DCA kind of approach to transitioning the values in a more incrementalist kind of approach - maybe ending in something like this at time B
  33%, 25%, 18%, 16%, 8%.  Even though the change from time A to time B might not seem like it is a very great change in the allocations, sometimes shifting around investments can be a pretty involved process, but still accomplish getting the investor in-line with his/her own feelings about the market in light of various other factors, including sometimes adding an investment or two  from his/her holdings or removing one or two from the mix. 

A lot of the tailoring would of course be attempted to be matched with the investors: cashflow, other investments, view on bitcoin as compared with other possible investments, timeline, risk tolerance, time and skills for managing portfolio and researching.  There is, ultimately, not going to be any "perfect" way of investing, but any investor who attempts to approximate the calculations of allocations in a way that is most tailored to his/her own situation is going to be a lot closer in line with comfortability and better prepared to make future adjustments and tweakenings as warranted by his/her own discretion.

Do a search and replace of BTC with Bitcoin and I fully agree with this.

Quick look at the weekly



Price continues to track the second down leg as expected...

the 50 & 200 day EMA's look to have established a pretty convincing downtrend. Price is heading back towards the bottom of the big triangle that broke down on 12th November I expect the ~6100 to be a pretty key level. However, I wouldn't expect that to be tested until late Jan.

If anyone can make something positive out of this chart then I'm anxious to see it!

And your point?

There is the same kinds of calling for down when the price has already gone down 70% or 85% from an ATH  or 50% from a local high. 

People say all kinds of dumb shit that assigns too high of probabilities to future events, and they can be equally guilty when they are failing and refusing to account for downward correction to BTC price when the BTC prices are going up and on the other side of the coin, they are failing and refusing to account for upwards BTC price movement (a reversal of the local trend) when the BTC prices are going down. 

Seems to me that folks assigning high probabilities to down now, whether they are calling for $5ks or they are calling for revisiting $3,122 bottom are equally guilty to over exuberance that may or may not play out in favor of their assertation(s).

Of course, the action that any BTC investor should be considering should be based upon his or her own situation, and if s/he has already accumulated some BTC or is new to BTC.  I always suggest to get some stake in BTC, similar to the person above (Lieldoryn) who was suggesting that people might want to establish a stake in BTC in case it goes up from the then price of $16k or whatever it was on that day.  Of course, any person investing into BTC or any other asset after a 78x price appreciation over the previous 2 years, should have been considering their getting a stake with a bit of skepticism regarding how much of their funds to allocate at those prices.  Of course, retrospectively, any price might seem ridiculous if the price ends up moving in considerable ways with the passage of time, so in any case, none of us are investing retrospectively.  Instead we are investing based on the information we currently know and attempting to take a rational and reasonable approach to invest prospectively.

Sure some guys want to attempt to play around with guessing, but dollar cost averaging, HODLing and buying on dips have been tried and true methods through bitcoin's history, and even today, as I type, there is no real convincing evidence that changing to some other method of attempting to time and to play around would be prudent in terms of future BTC price performance expectations.

Posted on 11 December 2017, amazing example of FOMO. This thread is gold for many reasons. A lot to learn from that frenzy phase two years ago.

Just quoting this one but there are many in this topic, however the first 2 pages also have some amazingly good predictions (in addition to the OP), for example posted the same day:

I like Masterluc, he is mysterious and a big picture guy.  People have to translate from his language, that means we might just be misinterpreting so I cant take it too seriously without speaking with somebody fluent in Russian.   But that latest graph is really super simple, I definitely like him now because he agrees with me apparently lol  
  Bearish till we break a trend declining in the highest prices for most of this year, thats fair enough.   When it breaks that trend to come back and adjust and look for a new setup is going to be required but we'd get 10k I guess

It has done well since last look but I'd class it as faltering steps and on the weekend I'm wary.    Its like a ship in harbour waters, till it clears into open sea and the volume of mid week I dont have confidence.    Stay above 7440 and clear and confirm above 7770 say would give notice on an attempt to breaking masterluc's or anyones noted negative trend of the last few months.
   Seems like its wanting to see-saw between two possibilities, cant say anyone with negative estimations is wrong and I dont see its done enough yet to be called positive and it'll tip both ways to confuse us more as no doubt BTC stays volatile.

Are you talking about the models that I mentioned, because I am not promoting or arguing anything, except rebutting the proclamations of diptwat Bossian by providing some alternative considerations that he seems to be ignoring in terms of how probable he is asserting his own seemingly FUD spreading nonsense is suggesting to have decently high odds of coming true.   So all I was suggesting is that he seems to be assigning too high of odds to his own proclamations.



Of course, I am NOT asserting that his model might not end up playing out, but BTC is not a mature asset, so it seems quite short sighted to be attempting to assign mature market attributes to it....  which surely would seem to be the case when someone seems to be overly relying on technical analysis that comes from seemingly more lackluster performing assets.


Could be true that there is a need to revisit some of the lows to weed out some more weak hands and allow for stronger buy support to catch up with price, but down before up or even necessitating a longer BTC accumulation period is doubtful a condition precedent in order to BTC prices to continue up from here.   Also, looking at the four year fractal model, it surely appears that BTC's price spurt from $4,200 to $13,880 did get a bit ahead of itself.. and surely with our current set of corrections, we seem to be experiencing some return to the mean, in terms of that particular 4-year fractal model.


Fair enough.



Of course, Masterluc is all over the place with his predictions in the past couple of years, and just because he has revised his BTC price predictions a number of times is far from making him any kind of BTC price sorcerer - even though he seems to get quite a lot of credit for BTC price predicting skills.

To be fair, those models aren't definitive or proven. If they were, we wouldn't be trading in the $7,000s since Bitcoin's future value would be assured. Extrapolating works until it doesn't.

I do understand where he's coming from in terms of market cycles. Market bottoms are usually long, sideways accumulation periods, sort of like BTC in 2015. To be honest, I never felt we had that sort of accumulation off the $3,000s. It's possible the rally to the $13,800s was part of a multi-year accumulation period and we have lots more sideways ahead of us. This is not what I'm expecting but it's possible. Masterluc is predicting something like that now: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53048197

Your prediction of a largely flat BTC prices in 2020 and perhaps only a slight increase in BTC prices in 2021 seem to have pretty damned low chances of happening in the minds of anyone who has actually studied the patterns of the Bitcoin space including the stock to flow model, the four-year fractal model, the s-curve exponential adoption metcalfe networking model and any other similar models that seem to demonstrate an increase in ongoing BTC buying pressures with the passage of time, especially in these seemingly early days of adoption.

Of course, some monkey wrench can be thrown into any of these patterns in order to allow more probabilities to your price prediction projections, but there are really no signs of such, including your agreed upon expectation that bitcoin prices are ultimately going up, just delayed from your seemingly disingenuous perspective.   

In other words, you seem to be assigning quite higher than 50% odds to events such as down before up that are likely to be quite less than 20% of happening in any way close to your asserted proclaimed expectations absent some fantasticly bearish currently unknown developments that could happen but surely they don't even seem to be part of your own prediction model.

Yes totally agree here, said it before, I think if we ever go back to 13k range then Bitcoin price will very quickly head to 20k. There should be a resistance at 20k though (because of the previous ATH) but it's more a psychological resistance, it wouldn't hold for too long and 25/30k should be fairly easy.
The issue I have is that this 13k price will be extremely tough to reach again, and IMO it won't happen next year or even in 2021. I have a price in the 5k-6k range for end of next year.

I believe year 2020 will be unusually "stable" (so to speak) with a price staying between 6k to 9k most of the time. At this moment most holders will wonder if it is a dead end...

different strokes for different folks, i guess. i've never looked at the 200dema direction as an indicator like that, or backtested it on other markets. i would say we need several more years data to say how informative that is for bitcoin.


you omitted the conditional. i said it's in the bag if the june 2019 highs are broken. if that happens, a massive number of sellers and shorters will be trapped and will drive a run to the ATH. compared to the rally this year, it would be a very modest target.

Sorry to comment some days late, but that is one of my favourite topics.

The problem with Bitcoin is that it's essentially a big circlejerk. If the price is going up because speculators bet that it will "become big", miners will follow, providing more security. You could think that this could be a good sign and a precondition for an adoption as a store of value (as the well-known "collectible -> store of value -> medium of exchange -> unit of account" theory shows).

The problem that it can always be the other way around. There is no security that the price will stay high, that security (provided by miners) will stay sufficient, and so on. If we break the long-term positive adoption/price trend somewhen, then the price could go to almost zero, and security will follow. Bitcoin was created out of thin air, it can also disappear.

That's where the comparison with gold fails imo, because gold at least has some "base value" because of its traditional and industrial use. The question is then: can Bitcoin provide a similar "base value"?

I think yes, and this base value is provided by merchant adoption. If people realize the value of the protocol as a way to provide an "account" for payments and savings to everyone without banks and intermediaries, and adoption follows, then there will be always a market for Bitcoin if there is merchant adoption. Merchants stabilize the value, above all once they use Bitcoin as the primary unit of account.

It's not a problem that now the merchant adoption is low, that can follow, we still have time for that. But eventually, before mass adoption really catches on, we come into a situation where, without merchant adoption, we're heading for a very bumpy ride in the future, with uncertain outcome.

Here I agree completely with you.

Some good points STT. Whatever your long-term outlook on BTC is, even if I am massively wrong and it doe's have another Hail Mary in it at some point, I don't think there is anything in the market that suggests its in the short-medium term.

All this bearish action needs to get fully rinsed out for a new bull market to start.


the death cross is conformation of the 200d EMA changing direction, thats why the one in July 2015 matters more than the one in September, the september one was meaningless because the 200d EMA had already turned up.

So the cross that just happened, was as the 200d EMA rolled over, so you might see the 50d EMA cross back above, that will be the false signal, because the 200d is going down. The 50d will fall right back in line with the trend. (Just like it did back in 2015)

"retesting the ATH is in the bag IMO" sounds like wishful thinking in the circumstances. Are you *sure* you are being objective?

I dont tend to go with that cross stuff, MA is just momentum of previous pricing which is worth paying attention to.    Right now 200 DMA isnt a negative, it has flattened out but was still rising till just recently.   I would equate that to a more neutral long term bias then it might feel just this moment.
   My immediate reaction to current action is that its struggling too often to be anywhere near to positive for near term.



Failing to break upwards like this unless it resolves better in the next few 4hr bars, that would seem to be a failed move.   I think the phrase the trader I follow says is failed moves lead to fast moves, in that if we do attempt upwards and lose our footing and pull back down then take that as a knock back and its negative sentiment to be wary of.
    This is just 3 min bars, while I wasn't paying attention I now wish I'd placed a short on that pin though Im not sure my account is even that responsive on orders as its quite briefly attempted 7727.   My take is, more negatives to digest.

exactly. the same thing occurred this year. we had a golden cross (daily 50/200 cross) in april 2019. the comparison to 2015 suggests that the current death cross may be a false one.


there has been immense accumulation or distribution occurring over the 6 months since the $14k top. so if the june high is broken, retesting the ATH is in the bag IMO.

Yes that chart there is a death cross, but what you are looking at there as a 200 day EMA that is undergoing a reversal. So I would consider the death cross a false signal. I'd say it's the golden cross just before that you would want to pay attention to. (20/20 Hindsight yeah I know!)

In the current scenario, 200 day EMA is rolling over so the death cross is basically confirmation of trend.

My prediction has a mother year to play out, so even if you get a short term spike up, I don't think it would signal the end of the long term bear market.

The chart looked pretty bleak in autumn 2015 coming off this death cross too, but we all know what happened next:



There's no point making predictions. That only reinforces biases and causes one to dig their heels in when the market moves against them. Sort of like how you were calling the top since $9,500 on the way to $13,800 this year.

It's more important to react to the market. In that vein, let's say hypothetically that the market bucks the death cross like in October 2015, breaks the downward channel, etc. Will you still be bearish?