Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 3529. (Read 26610052 times)

Proof that you do not read before you jump to conclusions. Daily DCA
Daily DOLLAR COST AVERAGING

Simple comparison: When Warren Buffet starts telling you that BTC is a safe investment it will be time to go full fiat.



When charting with TA it is important not to have an opinion on the path before it presents itself. If you already have a story, the lines on the chart can be manipulated to fit that story. As a participant in this thread, I know I get much more feedback when I post bullish TA versus bearish TA. He apparently changed his first model to reflect a higher amount of praise he would receive to promote the 100K narrative.

Wow.. you must suck really badly if you are comparing your performance to proudhon's performance, especially proudhon's price projections.

On the other hand, most of us already have some pretty good ideas that such donkey-breathed being, aka proudhon, is either a ringer or he has extensive brain-damage (probably a bit of both). .In any event, it would be good to call him age-appropriate names wherever and whenever possible... he get's a lot of scholarly motives (if that is the right name?) from such.. since he is sort of stuck at 12 and a half years.. for some reason? - even though we should not be feeding those kinds of damaged juvenile animals.. it only encourages them to spout out more puzzled pieces of disinformation.. like they are stuck in a time-warp, never got past the 6th grade in terms of calculation skills, and still believes that bitcoin is a baby (believes in santa claus too).. just like them.

Explanation

Stepping in here, because this translates to a significant probability that I will lose almost all of my BTC:


Other than "buy a time machine, go back, and bat-slap myself a few months ago", do you have any suggestions for someone who fell into a margin debt trap?  There are no right answers in this all-wrong situation, but I want to pick your brain.

If I had been willing to "cash out" (I hate that term), I could have exited this position at $47k-48k last month, and walked away with more BTC than I started with.  I didn't do that, because selling BTC is unthinkable.

Instead, for much of the past week, I was liquidating other assets and pouring proceeds into the distressed account.  I drew the "no more!" line on Sunday, because I could lose absolutely everything this way.  To begin with, most of my liquid or liquidatable assets were in BTC - now trapped as collateral in the account that first ate all of my BTC as I added collateral to avoid losing BTC, and then has been eating everything else, too.  Other things elsewhere are safe, but mostly gone already.  I am good at hunkering down and waiting out bear markets, as long as I am not at liquidation risk!


If we go down to $25k (never mind lower), I lack sufficient assets to avoid selling most of my BTC - or worse, having it sold for me in a huge market-dump into a red candlestick, with a penalty.

I can try to scrape along searching for the bottom, selling the least BTC possible with each drop (as I luckly did today).  That risks my missing the crash, and getting liquidated - or miscalculating, and getting liquidated.  For this reason, I have not been eating properly, sleeping properly, taking care of myself, or taking care of other things in my life - including things that could make money!  I have caught it at the edge many times - each time before, liquidating other assets and pouring them in; this time, selling BTC.  Now that I am run down to selling BTC, and I would be selling each local bottom before the next drop, I would sell low every time - bleeding out piece by piece, until almost nothing is left.

This has been ongoing for months, in a downward spiral of ballooning debt and shrinking assets - worsened by desperate, "must do something" attempts to make money trading altcoins on margin (!), in a chain-reaction of "I know better than this!" mistakes that seemed necessary to fix earlier mistakes.  My whole life is a wreck, and I am personally a mess - but never mind that; I am struggling to save my BTC, the important thing.

In February's worst crash, a trusted friend advised me to exit at $35k with whatever BTC I could recover - just in case we dropped low enough to wipe me out.  I replied that if I were to dump my BTC at $35k, and it turned out to be unnecessary, then I would kill myself.  I meant that seriously; I was not just joking about it, as I am now (for the moment).  In February, not dumping turned out to be the correct choice.  Before today, I never sold even one satoshi for dollars (other than spending in normal use of Bitcoin as money).

If we really go down to $25k or lower soon, the correct choice now would be to exit at $31k $30,500, dropping as I write this.  Thus I would lose most of my BTC that I have held for years, to save some scraps.  But I do not think that I am even psychologically capable of selling BTC, unless forced.  Not selling in the bull market - and especially not selling in the bear market!  I can't do it.  I just can't.  It is not "only money", because Bitcoin is not "only money".  I've lost a lot of dollars before, laughed, and walked away - but this is Bitcoin.

And if I were to dump Bitcoin at $31k $30,500, and the bottom was already in - eh, you guessed it. ☠️

So, bearing in mind that I am not strictly rational about BTC in the sense of "an economically rational actor", what is the least-bad choice?

mindrust myself out?  As my friend argued, the difference is that mindrust was trying to save his worthless fiat shitcoins; he was at no risk, as long as 1 BTC = 1 BTC.  I am trying to save bitcoins, not dollars; and I would sell the least necessary to free up whatever little bit remains.  I calculate PnL in BTC, not USD.  Though having dollars is nice, because it means I can look for a good opportunity to cash out to BTC.  Anyway, this option potentially carries a very expensive cost externality, as aforesaid; but I do consider all options, even the ones I immediately reject.

Keep scraping along, searching for the bottom?  I can currently survive down to about $29,200; with some income that I expect soon, I could push that a bit below $29k a few days from now.  For every $1k drop below that, I will need to sell off a larger and larger proportion of my BTC - that is, if I catch it before the liquidator bot.  But if the bottom is already in - or even if it is almost in (say, if the bottom is $28,500) - then scraping along saves BTC, just as I saved >1 BTC today by selling 0.5 BTC.

Also, should I absolutely stop pouring any more assets into this account?  It is a money-eating, asset-eating sinkhole - as an "economically rational actor" would have recognized long ago.  The incoming money that could be used to push down my liquidation price by a hair, could also be used to buy BTC (whether now - or later during a bull run, because "incoming money" is an airdrop of an altcoin that's down much worse than BTC).  But if spending it on BTC safely in my wallet causes liquidation of that account, it would be the most expensive BTC purchase ever!

I emphasize again that there are no right answers in this wrong situation.  There are only dilemmas, educated guesses, and attempts to pick the least-bad option.

If you would be so kind as to bounce around some ideas, I will be thankful - and I may or may not do whatever you suggest.  Either way, I will not blame you for the results of my own decisions, or for unheeded suggestions made in good faith (= with intent to maximize BTC, not maximize dollars) - just as I didn't blame my friend for urging me to dump and get out at $35k in February, even though it turned out to be unnecessary, and we visited $47k just over a month later.  And the posing of questions in a conversational way does not preclude the offering of other thoughts.

[Edited to fix a thought that got logically disconnected in the writing process, due the second-order effects of being glued to the chart without adequately eating or sleeping.]

Explanation

Explanation

hahahahaha

shit happens.


Should courier deliver to you (OOM) (via drone) a bat slappening merely for running out of fiat(s)..

 



 


I doubt that we are even close to max pain...

bears are going to push the BTC price down as low as they can and hold it there as long as they can.

So we cannot really know max pain in advance, even though we might know that it is over after we have bounced from there and stayed significantly above that point for a decent amount of time.

So for example, max pain could be going down to the 200-week moving average or even going below that and maybe staying there for a certain amount of time... sure it does not seem plausible.. but for sure manipulators shoot to achieve the implausible and to sustain it for as long as they are able.. and we know that the 200-week moving average is currently at about $21,750.

In essence, we can try to give probabilities of what max pain might be.. and for sure that is not going to be easy.. including that even seemingly low probability events could end up happening.... and for sure many guys will continue to buy. all the way down.. and for sure I would need to reassess my cashflow if we were to go below $25k.. even though at this time, I feel that i am prepared for events that I consider to be pretty highly improbable.. including that I do not believe that it is very likely that we will go below $25k or even sustain for very long.. even though I have buy orders that go lower than that.. but even as a long termer. I don't really like the idea of going below $25k... even lower $30ks is not comfortable, either... but yeah, still better for longer term HODLers being in the lower $30ks or even going into the $20ks than it was when we were in the sub $10ks.. so there is that angle, too.


That's a dumb question.

You deserve a bat-slappening for merely asking such dumb question.


Look... everyone wants bat-slappenings.


Go figure?


Batslappenings everywhere.




The only way that MSTR gets margin called at BTC spot price of $21k is if they do not do anything.  Do you really believe that there is any kind of meaningful chance that MSTR would not add collateral to a BTC position that would otherwise get margin called and that ONLY constitutes about 15% of their total BTC holdings (collateral of 19,466 BTC out of 129,200k BTC that they own)?

https://cryptoslate.com/microstrategy-could-defend-21k-btc-to-stop-a-margin-call/

Yeah seen it and your right. Utter cr@p.
Daniel Day Lewis has done some good films.
I also liked Shutter Island with Decaprio.
Original Matrix is one of my favs though.

Explanation

A post from an obvious bitter loser like this causes me to speculate that maybe the bottom is in?  hm?  go figure.  hahahahaha


I don't know how anyone can really know when the down momentum is going to stop.

Sure there are theories about Not trying to catch a falling knife - so it can be difficult to know what kind of a strategy might work under such circumstances.

Personally, I attempt to just let the chips fall where there will because by the time you notice momentum and try to adjust to account for such momentum, the momentum may well only continue for a short period.. and.. just catch you doing the opposite of what you are supposed to be doing.

Any of us can also get caught talking out of both sides of our mouth..

I have not really been shy about having my buy orders $1k apart for quite a long time.. gosh the last year and a half?.. but sometimes there could be justification to spread those out a bit more.. and maybe even make them $5k apart.. and then just let the chips fall where they will.

Accordingly, a good spot to have bought may well have been above $35k.. out of the theory that the 100-week moving average would not get breached... but then once it was breached, then that did contribute to some cascading in which buying every $1k might not have made sense.. and whether we talk about every $5k or every $2k or $3k or even $10k as better spread adjustments, it is not really easy to know, even though there had been a bit of justification that if $35k were to fall, then a certain amount of additional downity momentum would follow from that... but then at the same time, not even that was guaranteed, and personally, I don't even feel bad for having had bought at each $1k increment between $30k and $35k - and so far none of my buy orders below $30k have been filled... even though the price has gotten down to $29,731, so far.. but there could be some justification to just suffer and remove some of the buy orders below $30k and to lump them at various points..

Within the past week and really even before the break below $35k, I had already restructured my buy orders and I had even decided to keep my pre-existing $1k increments (even though I adjusted the amounts therein), and at this point, I still am not feeling any compelling reason to make any further adjustments to increase the $1k increments.. and another justification is that the lower the BTC price goes, the $1k increments is constituting a greater percentage of the overall price as compared to when the BTC price was in the $40ks, $50ks and $60ks.

I mussed the image.  Image tag added (and edited into the below quote).  Today is not a good day for me!  Someone, please quote me again - oh, thanks, it's already done.


I want to make one thing deadly clear:

I was NOT margin-trading BTC.  If I were doing that, I would now be in high profit because I would have sold at $48k (and maybe shorted it).

A few months ago, I bought on margin between $35k and $43k.  Some things went wrong, with complications from other transactions; leverage wound up higher than planned, but still at what seemed a "safe" level.  Then, I held through $48k because I do not want to sell any BTC, ever.

I was one of the idiots trying to increase LTH BTC by leveraging BTC to buy more BTC in the dip, then slowly repaying the margin loan from other income.  (Plus doing some of that "borrow against your BTC!" stuff for other purposes; this is the succinct version.)

That's similar to what Saylor does.  Why shouldn't I do it?  Oh, yes, because Saylor has access to lending terms that are not insane.

Exchange margin accounts make loans on the worst possible terms:  If the fuzzy-notional price of an oracle (not even the real market order-book price) dips even one microdollar below exactly $x for even one microsecond, then a robot instantly trashes your collateral.  Sells down, market-dumps - with liquidation penalty.

You get no "margin call", as in a traditional margin account.  (Or as Saylor would receive, if BTC crashes low enough.)  If you have other assets elsewhere, you get no opportunity to decide how best to limit your own overall losses.  If you have other assets elsewhere, they are not considered when calculating your account's risk of default.  And BTC is sufficiently volatile that there is no "safe" level.

...And there is no accounting for the fact that a fluctuation bottoming out slightly below your liquidation price may last only hours, minutes, or even seconds.  At 00:00 UTC today, my liquidation price level was about $29,975.  Seems safe, yes?  Well, there was a time when it seemed safe.  "If Bitcoin stays over $30k, I am ok."

The oracle only priced BTC below $30k for a brief time, sometime between 00:00 and 01:00 UTC.  In that time, I market-dumped several chunks adding up to 0.5 BTC.  When I hit the dread SELL button the first time, I saw my health meter flash as low as 0.01%... yes, I cut it that close; and I am damn lucky.

With no time to think, no time to make calculations, no time to set limits, I just kept shaving down as the price oracle kept dropping.  I was running away, as the "official" price chased me down towards the mid-$29k range.

Then, suddenly, the oracle was back over $30k; and my last sale was the absolute lowest actual sale today on this exchange.  I personally cut through the book, and made the very bottom of the wick!  It was all over in minutes.

If I had not caught it - if I had not sold anything - then a robot would have dumped much more out of my account.  (And done it all at once - probably cutting through the order book as low as $29k or even lower, due to how market maker bots arrange their orders during times of high volatility.)  My total losses would have been catastrophic.  By market-dumping 0.5 BTC at the bottom, I saved (multiple-times 0.5) BTC.

I have other money and assets that I may have preferred to lose, in preference to selling BTC so low.  But there was no time for that.

---

The problem is not borrowing money to buy BTC.  (Is it a problem for Saylor?)  The problem is borrowing money on the worst possible terms.  Positively malicious terms.

For most other types of loans, a borrower's default is not in the lender's best interest.  Collecting on defaulted accounts is lossy, and high-overhead.  Therefore, even the harsher parts of the lending terms tend to be tempered by the lender's desire not to need to deal with delinquent or defaulted accounts.  Most lenders seek to minimize defaults.

The entities offering cryptocurrency margin accounts have a perverse incentive to stack the loan terms to maximize borrower defaults.  Want to buy BTC at a discount?  Set up an exchange, offer margin accounts, wait for the dip, and then stockpile BTC in cascading liquidations!

The whole cryptocurrency margin ecosystem has the incentives of loan-sharking.  Those incentives are exploited in full accord with the ethics of people who also profit from pump-and-dump Ponzi-coins.

You need to be either stupid or crazy to take a loan on these terms, for almost any purpose.  To avoid accusations of deficient IQ tantamount to mental retardation, I plead a bout of temporary insanity.  Do I know better than to do this?  Yes, I do.  Why did I do it - why, why, why!?  I have asked myself that many times, after I got in too deeply to get out fast without drastic losses.  Chalk it up to temptation, starting with a little bit of something really safe ("lol, I can survive a crash even to $10k!"), then one thing leading to another as the account spins out of control.

---

Gun, knife, poison... suggestions?  Self-immolation is cool hot.


Eureka:  Self-starvation!  That's the ticket.

Or perhaps, I should be happy that I kept most of my BTC (for now), and simply work on extracting it from this debt trap.  Don't expect prompt replies.  I am busy with that, plus lots of this:

Explanation

Maybe you are hitting on another developing pet peeve of mine?

Daily cost averaging seems to be a misleading attempt at a euphemism... and the term is not daily cost averaging, it is dollar cost averaging (this correction about the "proper" term does not have to do with the dollar.. but instead getting away from expectation that there is any kind of meaningful justification to be maniacally in regards to buying every day.. which is more of an advanced practice rather than an entry-level practice).

In bitcoin, I personally recommend accumulators (and even newbies) to figure out something on a weekly basis (or maybe bi-weekly if they are just coordinating it when their paycheck comes in, if that is how they get paid).. but sure, daily might work too - even though there seems to be too many potentialities that small amounts could fuck you up in terms of unnecessarily causing your fees to be way more than they need to be (the fee level and way of doing fees of course, vary from exchange to exchange).  

Sometimes even weekly DCA does not work for folks in lower income locations because there might be a need to get over a certain value threshold in order to cause the fees to be more effective and less burdensome...

For example, if you are able to do any amount and the fees are just a percentage - like 1% or even high fees like 3%, then it may not matter so much if you do the transactions more frequently, such as daily, but some places have a flat charge and then also a percentage after charging the flat charge.. .. so maybe there is a flat charge of $1 or $5.. or something that causes a need to attempt to lump sum rather than having a whole bunch of small transactions and ongoingly paying such a flat fee that eats into how much bitcoin you are able to get through each transaction and even overall if you add up your transactions over time you end up getting royally fucked by fees in some of those situations that have flat fee charges to supplement percentage charges.  

Seems to me that we should not want poor people to get even more poor merely because they are failing to adequately strategize ways to attempt to lessen (or minimize if possible) the various fees that they might end up paying... so fuck the misleading description of daily cost averaging because that is not the proper term... it is called dollar cost averaging...

Ps... otherwise congrats on having had established a timeline for regular and ongoing BTC purchases.. for a decent amount of time into the future (that's something like 8 months) .. that seems like a great recommendation that can apply to a large number of folks who have not yet established a decently meaningful/significant amount of BTC (relatively speaking of course).. .. and surely, as a supplement, for those who have not gotten close to fuck you status, it may well be better to consider that they will be DCAing into bitcoin for the next 4-10 years or more.. and of course, devil is in the details regarding how aggressive they are able to be and if they have other investments or if they are just getting started with relatively small amounts of ongoing and regular BTC buys.

He made an equally bullish statement in 2011, and he was right. The price went up.


I'm just waiting for him to switch to his bullish avatar.

For sure, I understand the point of the meme... but at the same time, there is some practicality of NOT letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

In that regard, each person needs to figure out both how they are going to start to get exposure to bitcoin, and then if they do end up getting bitcoin exposure (which surely is recommended for everyone in this here world who has at least a 4-year investment timeline), another matter would be figuring out at what point, that bitcoin needs to be personally held rather than being held by third parties.

I doubt that the answer is that absolutely no value should be kept on exchanges (or with third parties), and surely some folks are structured in their wealth in a variety of ways that they might not feel any need to hold much if any bitcoin privately (even though recently we had seen some of the seemingly desperate measures that governments might take from time to time, and thus also influencing third-parties to potentially interfere or rob.. access to value).

For sure, systematically, bitcoin is way less powerful when folks hold it with third parties, but still the answer of how much to hold privately and how much to hold with third parties is not likely to have all or nothing  calculations for a lot of people who may well be wanting to keep their options open.. .. and also trying to keep a leg in both worlds while we are continuing to transition more and more away from  the various fiat institutions including that it could take 50 to 100 years to really have a meaningful transition away from fiat institutions.. so I doubt that the timeline of many of us is going to be holding and waiting for that long into the future - so a practical approach for a large number of folks from a variety of demographics (and economic levels) would likely be trying to ongoingly figuring out prudent and practical ways to ongoingly straddle both the fiat systems world while getting various kinds of (hopefully ongoingly increasing) exposure to bitcoin.


Exactly!!!!!!

Try to consider the positive... even though some of those fucks do not really deserve to get in at these prices, but whatever, bitcoin is going to do what it is going to do.. and cannot really do too much about it except maybe just attempt to tailor our own plans so that we are not feeling screwed financially or psychologically by whatever place we might be and where-ever we might be going in the short-term.

Regarding the short-term, who knows? 

I did not really anticipate having to concede that we have likely transitioned into a bear market, and for my own assessment, the 100-week moving average seems to be such a line .. which is at $35k.. and we have been below it for nearly three days now... so kind of difficult to deny once the price dropped below that point, and so far we are stuck below it..

So then one of the questions likely becomes how long are we going to stay below the 100-week moving average and for how long are these sales prices going to last?  just for a few more days?  a few weeks?  Months?  more than 6 months?..

I am personally not wanting to be a naysayer, but weeks or months does not sound unrealistic.. even though there does remain a possibility (for sure less than 50% and maybe even less than 40%) that the price bounces back above the 100-week moving average in less than a week... 3 days so far.. how long is it going to take?  BIG question, and I would not presume to know.. but I do know that once there is an assessment of being in a bear market, then the presumption should be that any consolidation break out will be to the downside.. and surely the opposite is true in a bull market.. so here we are.      - likely in a place that the vast majority of us do not want to be.. because the vast majority of us are into bitcoin because we want NGU to actually play out in the real world, not just in our hopes.

Explanation

Nice cheap drunk, ask any Ruskie.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/great-brands-of-inexpensive-vodka-759244




Goes well with ramen.