Bob:
1) When thinking about the time spent stuck at 10k, just remember that a few years ago we were bitching endlessly about how it was stuck at $600. That was so damn annoying, we wished it would DO SOMETHING....
Your $600 point does seem valid, here, yet there frequently can be questions and disagreements regarding where we are at, which is to try to speculate if we are going up or down from here and is the BTC price floating point pain bad enough.
I would say that in the vast majority of 2015 we were bouncing between $200 and $300... so yeah there was a lot of complaining, giving up and even expectation that the price was going to come back to those price points when it bounced out of that range at the end of 2015.
But then from November 2015 to May 2016, we were largely stuck in the $350 to $450 range, and surely a lot of complaining at that time, too.
When we bounced above $450 in late May there was a lot of complaining between about August and October because BTC prices had regressed to $500s and $600s and there were questions whether the Bitfinex matter was going to take down the whole of bitcoin.
So even when we seemed to have recovered and reached new ATHs in the beginning of the year (2017), there were large FUD spreading attempts in March/April 2017 saying that sub $500 had to be revisited because BIG money was calling for it.. blah blah blah...
So, for me, it seems that we are currently stuck in the equivalence of the $350 to $450 range, yet of course, we have hardly any fucking clue regarding how long it is going to take to break back above our most significant local top of $13,880, and then from there are we going to get stuck a few more times before making a new ATH.
Some people think that breaking above $13,880 will cause making new ATHs as a kind of "given" and even though it does not seem to be too far, in terms of percentages to get from $13,880 to $19,666, there still could be some decent opportunities for profit taking in there. .. and attempts to drag this matter out and to shake as many weak hands as possible before real out of control FOMO can sink in.
Seems to me that bearwhales have goals in life, too, and that is to keep BTC prices down for as long as they can and for as low as they can. They cannot help their lil selfies, and their own behavior contributes towards causing the fucking outrageous explosive out of control FOMO behaviors that ensue..
Long term HODLers understand a lot of this, and the restriction of the new BTC supply does not help to make the bearwhale behavior less explosive, but instead to add more fuel to the likely ensuing explosion that seems almost inevitable, but maybe becomes worse and worse (better and better for HODLers) the longer that bearwhales are successful in keeping BTC prices down... Maybe they become victims of their own success, but it is more like something that they can only hold in the cage for so long... and any of us that really recognize and appreciate the pattern (even if we know that it is NOT guaranteed) are going to have a decent amount of our value prepared in such direction - meaning having had attempted to muster enough resources to accumulate a sufficient quantity of BTC without gambling too much.
Yeah, of course, there are still a lot of dumbasses who actually believe the bearwhale propaganda, yet some of them are going to convert and/or "become aware of bitcoin" during such out of control explosion period, and sure some of them will become casualties of that mess, but if they get in early enough, they still have decent chances of benefitting greatly, even if they are buying at $25k.. but of course, the price might subsequently come back down to $25k or even lower.... but anyhow whether it takes years to play out or months is still quite difficult to know, even though many of us have tentative feelings regarding how long this could take, and of course, I try to prepare myself for scenarios that are way the fuck less bullish than what even I have in my head to be quite likely.. .which is my lame-ass 6% per year price appreciation scenario... hahahahahahaha,,,, and most of the damned time, I am quite satisfied to way the fuck outperform my own lame-ass conservative expectations.