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In 2015 a lot of people thought that the last ATH was mainly caused by the gox bot pumping and a lot of people really thought bitcoin was dying/dead..
Things did not look good..
I agree with you that overall there was a lot of negative sentiment, but I don't really agree with a characterization that people really bought into those GOX bot theories - in terms of single cause explanations, even though surely there were a lot folks throwing out single causation theories including that one - but I doubt in this thread there were many of us buying into that theory, even though surely it did come up quite a lot because it was a pretty big deal.
Sure I was new to bitcoin at that time, and we frequently see nonsense single cause theories explaining why the BTC price went up and why it came down and blah blah blah... I was buying through that whole time from somewhere near the $1,100 2013 top and also all the way down through out 2014 when there were a few pumps in the middle of 2014 while the BTC price trajectory through the whole year continued to go down and down and down, so I surely was not part of the bitcoin is dead camp, even though surely I could have waited until the end of 2014 or even into 2015 to have been able to buy more bitcoin at lower prices, but that was not my approach to the whole matter in terms of my not really knowing when the bottom was going to be in and feeling that I needed to be prepared for UP.. but the UP did not come until late 2015 and even that up in late 2015 was a kind of fake out.. that kept us stuck mostly in the lower $400s for the first 5 months of 2016.
I started playing with Bitcoin when it was in the 600s, still coming down from the gox ATH, and I saw it plummet to what, something like $160, and then just float dead around 200-300 for a very long time..
Ok. so you started playing with bitcoin well over a year before registering your forum account.. remember $600s was the price around June of 2014 when Tim Draper bought all 30k BTC or whatever it was being auctioned off by the US Marshalls in something like 10 lots or more and he bought all of the lots.. hahahahaha presumably bidding higher than all of the other bidders and also being called a loser for about a two years.. even longer than that.
Saying that Bitcoin was going to go to $10,000 back then was generally thought to have been crazy..
There were not too many people saying that, but there were a few and there were the various price prediction models that did tend to give lower probabilities to the more bullish prices and the timeline that it would take, but some of them were still out there.. so they were not completely absent from the space- depending upon with whom you (we) hung out with.
Now after 2017 we know it doesn’t take a gox bot to pump BTC, and we know much more about halving cycles now instead of them being a myth or a maybe now halving cycles are more of a fact..
Sure more and more refinement of various price prediction theories and surely 2017 did allow for quite a bit of bullishness to come back and also a proliferation of the bitcoin podcasting space and other sources of information related to bitcoin has increased since around that time. I am still catching up with some of the many bitcoin podcast content that had been put out since 2017.
It is much more clear now that Bitcoin is a wise and stable investment than it was back then..
Sure the investment case is getting stronger.. because the downside potential does not seem as likely, evey though there still is some downside potential, but the coming in of bigger and bigger players and guys like Michael Saylor (Microstrategy) can really cause some inspiration for others to buy including businesses and individuals, and surely there are still no coiners who are smarter than everyone else who say that Saylor is a looney.. but the positive news of bitcoin is still spreading - even though I am not going to concede that people really know about bitcoin out there whether we are still talking about people who have heard the name (but think that they know what bitcoin is, but they do not know shit), and there remain a decent lot of people who barely know about bitcoin and have really failed to act in terms of actually setting up some kind of a bitcoin account, whether it is getting direct bitcoin price exposure or some kind of exposure through a third party such as robin hood or GBTC or even paypal.
Back then yeah, you could legitimately say that you thought Bitcoin might actually go to zero.. Not anymore..
There were still quite a few of us who thought that it would be tough to drive bitcoin to zero, but sure I agree with your overall sentiment that bitcoin seems to be gaining more and more in terms of HODLers of last resort, so that causes difficulties driving the price down.. below certain price points..
Their might not be as much fast upside as their used to be, but Bitcoin is also not completely disregarded as a scam or pyramid scheme like it used to be in the mainstream..
The mainstream has come around now to taking Bitcoin very seriously, and everyone and their brother knows about Bitcoin now..
I will agree with you that it is not as bad in terms of the level of ignorance that used to exist, but some of that ignorance still exists in the mainstream - even though every once in a while you will see gems of good information come through the mainstream and even some bitcoin maximalists to get to share their ideas through mainstream sometimes so some of the pro-bitcoin facts and arguments do end up getting through...and not even characterized as being crazy.. sometimes. I would not proclaim that there is an absence of misinformation in mainstream because there still exists plenty of misinformation especially when it comes to convoluting ideas of crypto or bitcoin and crypto and various defi and NFT and suggesting that ethereum and bitcoin are nearly the same thing but just different and nonsense that gets lumped into some kind of a widespread phenomena that involves bitcoin, and they are not even factually incorrect about bitcoin providing a space in which a lot of scams can exist and even flourish - even if they are not able to differentiate what is bitcoin as compared to so many various projects that might really ONLY be loosely associated with bitcoin.
Back then, it was almost embarrassing explaining Bitcoin to people because they would think you were a lunatic half the time..
That's true that people now do not automatically jump to considering you a lunatic. At least now, they have heard the name bitcoin and they kind of might have some kind of a lame-ass clue about what you are talking about, but largely most people do not know shit about bitcoin, even a decent number of people who have bought some
in case it might catch on or who have gotten some exposure through Robinhood or some other way. But, yes, Rome was not built in a day, and adoption is expanding even though I would still suggest we are way in the early stages, maybe we are getting over 1% adoption.. and that is hardly some kind of representation that everyone knows about it even if there are a lot of people who are less ignorant about it and that lessening in of ignorance is seeming to improve quite regularly and on an ongoing basis... perhaps kinds of ongoing staggering Lindy effects that seem to mostly be getting better..and maybe even some quasi-correlations with BTC price movements, too.
