26.5k!
The slope of the bull market (log scale) is less steep than the run up in 2017 from $1000 to $2800. Level of hype and mainstream media coverage is relatively low. Hmm, what is a good way of measuring media coverage? Is there any way to search for mentions of "bitcoin" in say the New York Times?
It kind of looks like we could hit 100k-200k in 2021. Which is crazy.
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On Dec 22, some crazy person bet 0.2 BTC at 50% odds on Trump being president on March 1, 2020. They intentionally created this market so they could do the bet. And then managed to pay about 5 times the market price for their bet. This is pretty much the stupidest bet I've ever seen. Even if you think Trump is going to win, you could get the bet at 10% odds (or lower if you are willing to do a little work).
https://fairlay.com/market/president-of-the-us-on-march-1st-2020/?referral=011cd9eb-20b0-4de0-a519-ecf70a6a8cc0Unfortunately Fairlay doesn't let you sell out of your bet positions. So you have to hold until resolution.
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Augur is having its first US presidential market In Reporting. So far it was initially staked as Biden, briefly as invalid, and then now with 32 Rep it is staked for Biden. This is very little money ($400) compared to the volume of the market (50k?). I find it a bit concerning that the Rep token holders aren't smart enough to do Early Large stakes on the correct side of the questions. Early Large stakes would increase trader confidence in Augur and deter attackers. It's going to be easy to compete against Augur if they take weeks to resolve markets. There is 4 days left to Dispute the current tentative winner. So it will be fascinating to see if anyone does that.
https://bafybeiebluevb7w6qmwp5vnhwgzloyxg44vqbuzfoq4wcqyomco6oslxu4.ipfs.dweb.link/#!/markets
I've come up with a very strange scenario where it is actually profitable to fork Augur. Trump supporters would put a ton of money into buying Rep tokens (and quite possibly many of them already own a lot of Rep). This would boost the price of Rep. They would also boost the price of the yTrump Rep fork using futures. They would feel like they have 1) proven with an unbiased method that Trump won the election and 2) actually be in profit as their forked coin would be worth more than nTrump Rep.
This is similar to how ponzis and pump-and-dumps work.
Trump punters have already thrown away potentially millions of dollars betting on Trump AFTER the election results were 99.9% finalized (and donors have donated millions to the Trump campaign after he lost). Crypto users also have a history of spending hundreds of millions (or more?) on ponzis and scams (see HEX). We saw the power of hype and marketing in Bitcoin Cash's early success. It increased in value early on (hit 40%? of BTC price?). It is only three years later that is has died down to a relatively insignificant altcoin.
Under this scenario, with a succesfull attack, punters like me would stay far away from Augur. We wouldn't trust the yTrump side of it because the attack could be repeated. yTrump token would fall by a lot. nTrump would maintain a level of hype and take longer to fall in value.
The problem is that Augur relies upon people being rational, and the security is based on people trading on the rational side of a fork (and that side being valued more, and the other side losing their money). This assumption might be false.
I don't think this scenario is likely, but it an interesting disturbing possibility.