28 million in leveraged longs on BFX. Shorts barely changed. This is a dangerously unstable situation. Every one of those longs have to close at some point, either at a profit or a loss. It amounts to massive overhead resistance.
Where the hell is the pump gonna come from? Halving is priced in. SegWit is priced in even though it may not happen or happen on a longer time frame than expected. Global economic stability? Bitcoin lost 5% in a day, hardly a safe haven asset, especially given the current governance situation.
Bitcoin is a honeybadger, so price may go up, but if it does, it will be in spite of fundamentals, not because of them. There can be no sustainable rise without a permanent scaling solution.
I do believe segwit is not priced in, if anything word of segwit causing forks on the testnet has poeple selling ( which is a silly reason to sell, nothing ever works perfectly first time around ) But segwit will likely be priced in way after the fact. I will be looking to sell when segwit is released, in fear of it causing a complete mess, after a few weeks of it working fine, and we really do get a 1.75X capacity increase from it. i will buy back.
if it causes a mess which devs need to clean up, i could see price half overnight, and with that the mining industry will crumble, and with that bitcoin will crumble. implementing thousands of lines of code, and asking other node oppeterater ( blockchain.info wallets and the like ) to write some code to acomadate segwit, has HUGE downside risks, to much for me to just HODL and pray for the best.
but if we see segwit give us more then 50% capacity increase and then the 2MB HF is a go, we'll have 4X more block space this time next year, if we somehow manage to fill these 4X bigger blocks totally full again by this time next year I expect price to be at least double what it is now or at most 10x bubble like rise and crash. price has always been highly correlated with TX.
Actually, I think this is a really fair analysis.
There are some uncertainties with seg wit. Oh yeah, it seems like a really great idea, yet like you said problems in the testnet causes some uncertainties concerning whether fixes can be made and whether problems can be identified sufficiently and whether it accomplishes all or most of what it is billed to accomplish without causing various unexpected downsides.
And, problems could cause some delays in the actual deployment of seg wit into the real bitcoin space with real world applications built upon it.
Because I take a lot of the FUD with a large grain of salt, the upside of seg wit seems to be much more likely than the downside of seg wit... .. but until it is actually deployed into the wild, we will not know for sure regarding whether it is meeting or exceeding expectations or turns out to be a major disappointment (as some of the FUDsters seem inclined to suggest as a real and likely possibility).
