To me it seems that there is decent momentum to fairly reasonably take us another 20% or more beyond $80k.. and for sure, I would not presume the absence of resistance at $100k, but even bullwhales (to the extent that they actually exist) can start to act strange in the vicinity of those round numbers and there could be some desire to just get above $100k merely "for funzies" - even if staying above $100k might not be able to hold in the short-term (don't label me as a bear for saying that....)...
Merely for funzies? I believe the market isn’t like the early years anymore when whales made the market surge, or crash simply by market buying up, or market selling down, liquidating longs or shorts.
You can believe whatever you like in terms of the BIGGER players abilities or inabilities to move the market or to take advantage of momentum to push the market further than what it might have otherwise gone, and even your seemly somewhat detached beliefs that BTC market has become "too big" to move.
I believe you, but it’s not the same players of the early years who were manipulating Bitcoin in their basement “merely for funzies”, and communicating with other traders through forums and IRC. It’s currently a more sophisticated set of players who, I believe, won’t do anything “merely for funzies”.
Perhaps you are getting too distracted in terms of reading my assertion about what is "funzies" literally.
We already know that with the passage of time, the players in bitcoin have become more and more sophisticated, so it does not seem to be productive to be overly generalizing about the character of the bitcoin market players in 2013 versus 2017 versus now or various points between.
Surely, there is an evolving dynamic regarding both who are the market players and what kinds of BTC financialization (manipulation) tools are available to them in order to attempt to profit, whether they measure their profits in fiat within the BTC space or whether they are able to attempt to manipulate BTC profits to either make profits or stave off losses in other areas that they may perceive to be BTC competitors.
The BTC price is going to experience volatility in accordance with the various evolving tools that are available, and I doubt that we are even disagreeing about the likely ongoing changes in regards to the sophistication or size of the various players that are coming into BTC. I believe that we differ in some sense in that you seem to believe that there is some kind of sudden and meaningful change in the players and tools that really matters in terms of altering the various formulas (and price prediction models) of the past, and I largely characterize these changes as a BIG ASS SO FUCKING WHAT.
In other words, it seems really silly to me to be speculating all of the various ways that the BTC market is going to be changed and downplayed due to the various BIGGER players and changes in the BTC space, when the reality of the matter is that we have not really seen evidence of that and there are a lot of ways that speculation and theory can be made that show the changes in the BTC space make the players BIGGER and the tools BIGGER but a lot of those increases in BIGNESS end up being a wash in terms of really stiffling the various BTC models - so what ends up happening largely ends up being comparative to previous times even if the players and the tools got BIGGER.
So yeah I agree with you that instead of having a bunch of snot-nosed 14-year olds trading in their basement we have bankers, big companies and governments starting to dip their toes in the BTC battle ring, but bitcoin is already built to anticipate this kind of happenings, so the affects are not really changed in any kind of meaningful way.. except yeah, instead of getting 100x to 200x volatility in 2-4 years, we might only get 20x to 60x in the same time period... yet even with that level of lower volatility, it still remains as a greatly volatile asset with a whole hell of a lot of upside price potential and even a whole lot of abilities to push the price 50% up in a short period of time just for "funzies" (even if you don't like the word "funzies" and you seem to read too narrow of an interpretation in what I am saying when using such "funzies" descriptor).