Am I the only one here who considers the recent bullish sentiment to be irrational?
The bulls' main argument for a trend reversal seems to be the fact that, after falling ~$400 from this summer's highs, we have seen the first really significant bounce upwards. Honestly, I think that crashing really hard after a months long downtrend isn't exactly the best advertisement for potential new buyers, despite the bounce. And we urgently need those newcomers in order to absorb the constant downward pressure applied by newly mined coins.
The irrational bullishness expressed both here and on reddit indicates to me that the bulls have mostly already gone "all in", hoping to catch the start of a new bubble. And now the price is mainly pushed further up by traders on margin riding the momentum (
dollar-swaps on finex touched $24M just today!) and shorts getting stopped out. I don't think this is sustainable without a significant influx of new buyers (and holders) who help to carry the price further upwards.
Meanwhile, the chart on google trends for
"bitcoin" is going back down after that last disappointingly small spike which was probably caused by both the recent crash and the release of the "rise and rise" documentary.
The chart for
number of transactions may be increasing, but the ones for
transaction fees and
dollar-value of the transactions are going sideways. I consider especially the transaction fee chart as noteworthy, because it actually costs money to manipulate the chart and because it is not influenced by old coins moving around. My logic is that more transaction fees being paid could indicate more newcomers coming in, who only have non-fee-free coins to move around (besides indicating an increase in "real, non-manipulative" movement of coins, of course).
Volume seems to be decreasing for now, too.
Media hype is also not there, and I don't perceive the interest regarding bitcoin outside of the bitcoin related message boards as especially encouraging.
My personal guess is that bulls aren't going to give up yet and will try to give it another push to higher price levels. But I would be surprised if we actually made it to $450. From there on I expect the rally to fizzle away like the one in summer. We couldn't sustain a bull rally back then, even though there were significantly fewer coins in circulation at that time. We couldn't even sustain prices above $400 after that,. And I don't see how suddenly we could sustain such prices now. Nothing really has fundamentally changed after that crash below $300. So I predict the continuation of the downtrend after the next push upwards.
All IMHO, of course.