Doesn't matter what the charts say.... we are going down until something significant happens
I actually agree. We might even get a reprieve and a run up to $450, but we won't break the bear market until we get another flash crash. I mean, BFX is what, $50 (and went $70) below the last flash crash's finishing price... for it to end here would be like taking a girl for a nice night out on the town and forgetting to kiss her on her doorstep. That, like a non-event bottom, happens but that doesn't make it likely.
A lot of good things have happened to Bitcoin this year, tbh I am not sure why they did not affect the price the good way.
Part of it is manipulation, but the bigger thing is that the price you see on the exchange is not the present value (or not only the present value) but rather a prediction of Bitcoin's worth moving forward. So, Bitcoin is worth more, if you were conducting a standard appraisal, than it was a year ago. BUT, Bitcoin has less potential than it did a year ago (Gox, governments, regulations, competition, etc., etc.).
That's how I understand it. That we've come very far. That Bitcoin has a lot of value. That it is actually increasing in value. But that value is still forward looking towards the project's longer term projects and, through that lens, we maybe know now that it won't singlehandedly change the world (as many once thought and hoped back in the run-up days) but may be a substantial contributor to a different paradigm.
So you are saying that currently, Bitcoin is overvalued? And that for it to really be worth $410 or so per coin would be next year or longer?
More or less, yes. That it is either overvalued or fairly closely to correctly valued (the market is sorting that out). That the price is prospective. In some ways, this is already known -- we don't have an increase in demand being purchased from PayPal, for instance... the market merely prices in the expected increase in demand. Similarly, back when the price was $1200 (although that was largely due to upside manipulation), it wasn't because we were seeing the results of Bitcoin being adopted by the masses, but merely it was the expectation that Bitcoin would be adopted by the masses and the predicted implications of what mass adoption would mean for the future value.
So, the way I try to think about it is that we are really sorting out the value at least a few months down the road and our guesses can be grossly over or under. It's why this is such a risky game. In many regards, Bitcoin is still in its infancy to the point that people still don't know whether it will ultimately be successful or not. Anyhow, it is for that reason that the price doesn't jump, or at least jump much, on news. Institutions accepting Bitcoin doesn't mean that consumers will.
There are, of course, other factors. The main other factor is that companies can still, generally speaking, not hold their revenues in Bitcoin due to accounting rules and other regulations. Thus, somebody buys coins to purchase XYZ and the bigger merchants then have to dump them.