Well I expect at least a bit more realism after we dropped from 1200$ to 160$.
When will all the perma Bulls become disillusioned....? I mean there are still people thinking we will go straight to 30k$ with the next weekly candle.
If Karpeles was the motor behind the May 2013 and December 2013 bubble in the end we will never see 1200$ again even thought people think Bitcoin will take over the world but in fact the blockchain is the thing the world is interested in.
Long term, price will go up (even above ATH) if people start using btc or if they find a value holding it... And it doesn't take many people.
About Karpeles bubble(s). Just like he was pushing price up/down in the past someone is doing exactly the same right now (holding the price down). Market is manipulated... of course every market on the world is manipulated just that here manipulation is more obvious because market cap is super low.
For traders those 20$ swing are perfect so they are not complaining (unless they are losing).
About current situation. I'm thinking we will see a double bottom with higher low.
Why would the market be more manipulated then other?
It's not SOMEBODY pushing the price down when we recently hit 315$... It's market saying "This is the point were more sellers then buyers are."
Karpalese was likely just the motor creating this giant bubble and the attention bitcoin got because of that... It also created a lot of bagholders which are despertly waiting for the price pushing up again (perma Bulls going against any bearish thoughts which would make their bagholding even worse)
There is no law that bitcoin will succeed... I think it's much more likely we will stay for a very long time in a range not creating a new bubble... (previous performance is not an indicator for future performance)
At least for me it seems the world is not really ready/interested in Bitcoin but much rather they are interested in the Blockchain behind it.
bitcoin in it's current form is not really an advantage in a normal day to day use... Credit Cards and PayPal have their issues as well yes but it's not like they are that bad that everybody in this world would have to switch to switch to something which requires 30min conformations before completing the TX...
Maybe this will change in the future with sidechain / lightning network or whatever... But in the current form of Bitcoin as a currency is not the valuable thing... The Blockchain is the valuable thing.
Who knows Ethereum is still very interesting but they are having massive funding problems currently. I know Bitcoin enthusiast will never think of a Bitcoin 2.0 but there are system in planing/development which are much superior and with much more potential use-cases behind them...