I'm not even kidding guys. It has become clear that Bitcoin is entering the mass market now, though still just at the very start of it. While the 11x in the past 11 months has been astounding, this is just the beginning.
We will see 6 figures before 2020. Bitcoin user adoption is gonna grow from a couple dozen million now to hundreds of millions the next two years. Institutional investment in Bitcoin is gonna grow from basically non-existent now to a major new asset class for wall street in the next two years. $100k in two years might actually be a low prediction.
The price behavior you are describing would be extremely uncharacteristic of bitcoin and of any asset. If bitcoin is going to hit $100k, it's going to either happen in the next few months, or 4-5 years down the road after a massive crash and painfully slow recovery, like it did from 2013 to 2017. If the parabolic rise in bitcoin price doesn't continue up to $100k then it will crash before that. If it does, then it will crash after that. In either scenario, it crashes.
To be honest the most likely thing to happen is that CME group futures will start trading in mid December, and some random institutional fund will, on a whim, decide to throw $100 or $200 million dollars into a short position just for kicks and giggles, as a small speculative investment. This will cause the price to get absolutely annihilated, and the bubble will fall apart. An 80-90% decline seems realistic. Maybe we'll hit $15,000 before that happens. Either way, I'm cashing out of what little I have left in the next two weeks.
No.
First of all nothing I said is uncharacteristic of bitcoin. All I said is that it will go up a ton the next 3 years. I never said there will be no crashes along the way. There has been plenty of crashes and corrections this year and obviously there will continue to be crashes because the market gets overly excited during a bull run and a crash must come to correct the price and form a new higher base, and then it continues to climb.
Also you are acting like the crash of Mt. Gox is some normal repeating event that happened more than once and will continue to happen. What you're describing from end of 2013 until beginning of 2017 has happened exactly once and it was caused by the collapse of Mt. Gox. Past bubbles happened just like the nov 2013 bubble but the down period would only be like 6 months before the next meteoric rise. The 3 years it took to come back up was entirely because of Mt. Gox. So what you are saying is just wrong, nothing about bitcoin's history says it will either shoot up to $100k in a few months or else take 4-5 years. That's just your own opinion, which is fine, but don't act like it has any basis in the historical movements of Bitcoin. It's all just opinions.
Also I don't think you are understanding how the CME futures work. They are entirely cash settled. The market won't be touching bitcoin itself, and therefore won't affect the price of bitcoin. They will just be betting on bitcoin's price, like betting on a horse race. Shorting bitcoin in a futures contract doesn't actually short bitcoin, they're just shorting the price, and that would be an extremely dumb thing to do. Investors who do that are going to lose a lot of money. Shorting only works if you're talking about shorting actual bitcoin, and for that to happen all these institutional investors would first have to buy into bitcoin, which none of them have which is why they are creating this futures market so they can make all these bets without actually dealing with the bitcoin market.
1. Mt Gox did not cause bitcoin to collapse. It was going to collapse anyway, just like it did in all the prior bubbles (like you mentioned). Mt Gox was just the catalyst, and it was a large catalyst. Even if Mt Gox were not hacked, something else would have pushed the price down just as hard, or it would have just fallen for no reason.
2. You'll notice that the time between bubbles increases as the price increases. This happens for most assets. I don't see why bitcoin's largest bubble by a massive amount would crash and then result in another bubble in a much shorter time than we saw between the previous two.
3. You are right about the cme group futures actually. I didn't realize they aren't going to be settled, and I agree that this is pretty dumb. Seems really reckless and dangerous.
Well I'm glad we agree on #3 haha.
Still disagree on the first two things though.
Yes at the end of 2013 the price was crashing as it has in previous bubbles, but if you look at the previous bubbles they all took maybe 6 months or so to come back and start hitting new ATHs. The reason the late 2013 bubble took 3 years is entirely because of Mt.Gox. A large percentage of people in Bitcoin lost all their money in Bitcoin and it scared off new people coming in. Bitcoin basically went dormant for two whole years.
As for number 2, I haven't noticed that, in fact it's the opposite. Price increases as adoption increases, and this leads to a network effect adding greater adoption and therefore more buy pressure. We've already seen two major crashes this year in June/July and September. They both lasted about 6 weeks. If this had been a few years ago when hardly anyone had ever heard of bitcoin instead of 6 weeks those crashes might have taken 6 months to complete. And if you don't think those were bubbles, look at the price movement. Bitcoin really started moving about May 1st at 1400, so Spring bubble went from ~1400 to 3000, then crashed to ~1750, so it returned to just a bit more than before the bubble began. It then recovered and once it broke 3000 a new bubble formed in August from 3000 to 5000 and then it crashed all the way down to just under 3000. So that did in fact go all the way down to the price before the current bubble (so it was a total 100% collapse of that bubble, finding the new base for Bitcoin way back at the very start of that bubble).
In the past month now we've had two sharp crashes that came and went so quickly, one lasted like 8 days and the current one seems like it might also only last a week or so. You might argue that these aren't real crashes, but check them out. One bubble was 5000 to ~7800 and then it crashed all the way back to 5500 which is not much higher than the price before the bubble even started. The second bubble was 7800 to 11400 and crashed down to 8400. Again not much higher than the price was before the bubble started. These crashes recovered so quickly because crash time (as well as time between bubbles) is shortening, not getting longer, as price increases. This is because of the network effect, there are enough people in crypto now, or enough people that know about it, so that anytime it has a sharp crash now there are tons of people will to buy it up immediately to get that good price. It no longer has to sit and lick its wounds for 6 months (and again, late 2013 crash was extended far far longer due solely to Mt. Gox).