While I accept that trading is oftentimes more based on mass psychology than actual facts, I still find the "gox effect" to be puzzling.
If there were about 800k coins that either didn't exist or had already been stolen and were elsewhere, then there was 800k of fake liquidity in the market. Now depending on how you like to define total liquidity, that would have been anywhere between 5 and 20 percent of total liquidity.
When this was exposed, this should have had the effect on the market of bitcoin BEING 5 to 20 percent rarer, since the pricing up until then had been based on those coins being available.
I know the willy bot would have had some effect on ultimate highs, but I'm not convinced that in it's absence we wouldn't have seen 90% of the peaks at least, because really, independent traders would have been trying to work toward the same effect.
Anyway, I guess the mass confidence loss in the market due to gox shenanigans has had a big effect, thing is, when that confidence is back, that 5-20% of liquidity is still missing, so there seems to my mind a theoretical possibility that the market could see unprecedented rises.
True. But don't forget that people who bought vapour coins on gox currently have nothing. Lots of people. That is bound to have an effect. Willy is irrelevant as the last bubble was led by China and has never been confirmed. The major reason in my mind for this long bear market is that there were two bubbles in 2013 which drove up the price massively. It is understandable that the market is working through those gains now. For people who see the speculative potential of Bitcoin it has allowed some excellent opportunities for accumulation. If Bitcoin was a major technological disruptive revolution at 1000 dollars, then it is a major buy at 300.
Nearly half a billion dollars VC funding has trickled into Bitcoin in the last year. Engineering a price rise in this thin market is trivial and if that is what it takes to bring in the next major wave of adoption for BTC then that is what will occur IMO.
I see a lot of intelligent people question the use case for Bitcoin. For merchants it is a clear no brainer over reversible transactions like cc or PayPal that charge excessive fees. For the public I think it will be the first asset since gold that will function as a reliable and growing store of value with global utility as an Internet currency in the future. That is the selling point, the monetary properties that we all take for granted now, but were amazed with when we first discovered bitcoin.
Expecting such a fantastic asset class to be owned and used by joe public to the exclusion of 'big money' is silly. For this reason I think we will see massive price rises front run by investment houses and high net worth individuals or funds, possibly facilitated by an ETF.
Ignore the Bears and trolls like NotLambChop who sold very early and rue that decision every day, hoping for one more opportunity to get
back in. They wouldn't be here day in and out if they didn't hold precisely the same belief in the potential of Bitcoin as everyone else.