Trolls said bitcoin was in a bear market since Jan 2018 and the pump from 3 100 to 13 880 was fake thanks to chinese ponzi Plus Token. I say bitcoin has always been in bull market. 2018 and late 2019 "crashes" were just exhausted bulls taking a rest before the next charge. If we have another 6 months extensive bull run like in the first half of 2019, we may go up to 30 000 around the halving (4.5x from the local bottom 6 400). If we have some corrections on the way (which is more probable), then we might be around 18 000. Worst case scenario is to go around 11K at the halving. After that it should be a matter of several months to break the ATH. Anyway, the dreams of cheap coins below 6 000 are dying for good! The bear kids were spoiled by the many stops of the train in 2018 and 2019. Now they have to jump in motion if they don't want to be left out. I am all in although I didn't take that big loan which I wrote about in my previous posts. I found it is comforting to invest all fiat savings and have a non mortgage loan possibility as a backup in case some colossal crash happens.
You make a lot of decent points, hnbdgr, but you also seem to be a bit too bullish. Sure, the scenarios that you describe might play out, but shit, we cannot bank on $11k at the halvening to be the worst-case scenario.
There are definitely possibilities that bears, bitcoin naysayers, alt coin pumpers, financial and government institutions are able to employ resources to attempt to manipulate bitcoin's price down way below expectations for a longer period than anyone expects to be possible... so any of us who are HODLers or even new investors into bitcoin need to prepare ourselves financially and psychologically for those kinds of possibilities, even if they might be in the sub 10% arena.
I surely don't mind a bit of overleveraging towards the upside, and surely in order to become rich, sometimes we need to take advantage of resources that are at our disposal, whether that is credit or even various forms of cashflows, yet with any investment, the earlier days of establishing a decent stake that has decent odds of playing out profitably can be the most difficult time, and in bitcoin it surely seems that if you make sure that you have a 4-6 year time horizon, at minimum, you will likely be safe, even if you front load the matter a bit because of thoughts that some of our current BTC price prediction models are lining up towards decent bullish probabilities that cause UP to be much more likely than down, in current times, and that surely would be the leanings of a lot of HODLers in this thread.. and sure there may be some HODLers in this thread who are NOT really prepared for the less likely events, such as a dragging out of the four year fractal to 8 years or some other extreme (but still possible) bearish scenario.