Has anyone else gone through an obscene amount of alcohol in the last seven days or is it just me?
Probably just you....
hahahahaha
I'm just kidding.
Even when I feel quite calm cool and collected (with a decent plan to advantage from this seemingly extreme downwards volatility), the situation can still be stressful - because us BTC watchers can never really be sure what price point is going to hold, exactly and when the downward momentum is going to end, exactly.
This reversal in the past 10 hours at $7,625 does seem to have been based on a decent amount of dump spike volume that would be relatively convincing that the bears should have blown their wadds - but gosh.. we can never be certain until perhaps being more certain after we bounce back above a certain price point, perhaps that price point is above $12k-ish, currently?
It feels like just traders are left. Tether/Bitfinex still unresolved. Bitconnect might not have been a lot of money relative to bitcoin but it was a lot of people who are derping on YouTube and everywhere else “fuck all crypto”. ICOs are either getting sued or getting C&D by Texas. Anecdotal evidence points to 20k being top for a while. People in this thread retiring by selling above 10k likely means they won’t buy back at above 10k so that segment is gone. The regular people are gone. I have a friend who’s a multi millionaire. Double digits. He got burned on LTC by buying it above $300 when stupid TV was pumping it with “three simple reasons why it’s better then bitcoin” and last time I tried throwing him some signals like set your bitcoin buys at mid 8s, mid 7s and his response was “fuck this, I ain’t dropping another penny on this shit”. He got burned by the stock market a while back and to him this is just another market. Nothing special or different. Of course I could be wrong and who knows maybe hedge funds will buy to manipulate the futures market. People don’t understand bitcoin is a savings mechanism not a fucken get rich quick mechanism.
You touch upon several decent news talking points, yet there remains a lot going on in bitcoin, which seems to suggest that this latest price correction to merely have been within the realms of a normal pullback, after a bit of too much exuberance.
I think that the time range for recovery and hitting upon ATHs again is most likely in the 3 month to 18 month arena. There are just too many good developments in bitcoin, and even this current price correction has not drug us into a bear market, yet. Surely, I doubt you are even implying a bear market, yet, but if anyone wants to argue or suggest that we are now in a bear market, I assert that any such bear market assertion remains premature
I would say that if we go below $5k and stay there for any kind of meaningful time period then at that time we can start to talk about a bear market. Otherwise, the bull market remains. Of course if we dabble in the $5k to $7,500 territory for some kind of meaningful time, also, then at least a bear market discussion becomes more within the park of reasonable contemplation.
Your example of Bulls retiring above $10k probably does not seem a representational phenomenon. Accordingly, some bulls may have cashed out some coins above $10k, but with the passage of time, even these bulls may buy back above $10k, especially if they are buying in the context of a dip... so with the passage of time, lots of things can happen.... the price goes up, the price goes down.
Regarding folks who bought in above $12k or even above $15k, they are not losers unless they cashed out lower than they bought, and there remain a variety of possible plans that can allow these above $12k buyers to bring down their average price per BTC or just ride out the market by HODLing.