Bitcoin holders are funny bunch — especially the old school ones. They want to see the glory days of 20x returns in a year (and the accompanying crashes!) — almost like a drug addict looking for one more hit. Those days are gone. We should be aiming for 2–3x gains every year for the next couple of years, and then those returns should be steadily declining over time, but always going up and to the right — the power of compound growth will ensure that we still get 20x returns, but over a longer period of time and in more sustainable fashion.
I doubt that old timers are any more delusional than anyone else.
The fact of the matter is that none of us really know, and you don't seem to know either - because, even though I kind of agree that market cap increases and more trading tools (more mature in other words) likely causes the volatility to go down, we cannot count on any kind of return whether that is 2x or 3x a year or 20x over 10 years.
Furthermore, in retrospect we are going to be able to look back and to see what happened, and usually in retrospect it can be calculated in ways that are much more measured; however, when we are in the midst of attempting to predict price direction, we don't know and we cannot even be sure that we won't get stuck back down in another period of $200s.
Like you, I am mostly betting on up, and I have a pretty decent chunk of change in BTC because I think that it remains one of the most promising of investment categories, but I doubt that the path forward will be stable in any kind of meaningful way, and there also remains (in spite market cap and shorting tools) possibilities of irrational exuberance that could cause considerable and quick exponential growth - whether that is a 10x spurt, a 20x spurt or some other variation.
So in other words, there is nothing wrong with speculating or talking about 10x or 20x in a year or less, even though some folks are going to place differing probabilities on such, whether that is .0001% or 68%.. hahahahaha.. And it is also probably healthy to reassess from time to time.. recall a time period, when Adam continuously suggested $32k in the near future, now he is kind of suggesting $12k.., which shows that sometimes we have to adjust our expectations based on previous unknowns becoming known and the speculation about the probability of newly developing unknowns (both known and unknown)
