Quote from: Torque on January 10, 2018, 01:43:58 PM

Quote from: Phil_S on January 10, 2018, 01:40:41 PM

We're going back to 15k today, I can feel it!

I feel fairly certain that the group that has been shorting since $17k is the same group that started pumping the market on 1/2. They've been building a sizable short position ever since. Alts are going to get rekt soon.

I would normally tend to agree with this, as it is very much like what happened back in 2014. I remember some of the alts doing noise back then like PPC and Feathercoin and Quark. Go check those charts in CoinMarketCap now. They are not happy charts.

This time tho, a couple things are and feel different.

For one, cycles are shorter, mainstream hype is bigger and it seems even if there was a hard 80-90% haircut, it wouldn't last as long this time.

There's also the fees issue; and without getting political about it and whichever side you stand on, one must realize it does affect usage (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/sentbyaddress-transactionfees-btc.html#6m).

And then there's that new kind of dumb "investor", which, if you haven't been locked up in your house for the last month you've surely seen: the "omg this 0.10$ shitcoin is so cheap I'm buying".

And yes, the market cap is elastic and can as easily go back up as it did earlier this year; but if you look at the charts, they also look different from that time in that the wealth has been distributed more horizontally and all across the board (https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage, check the 'Others' grey line). It's not just shitpple or eth and the darn flippening. It will be at least marginally harder to swoop all that value back in.

And lastly, many of the teams and projects in this new wave are very different in nature to the ones from back then. Whereas we used to have early-adopters, solo-devs and crypto insiders teaming up in small teams creating the projects in a more grassroots way; it is now much more akin to the startup world, with most of the (relatively serious) projects already VC backed even before the "pre-sale". Funding + pre-sale + ICO. It's kinda nasty and a recipe for disaster, we all know it; but at the same time it also means the serious ones are not going anywwhere, they have runway money in the bank to keep going for at least a year or two.

I'm still open and even expecting a hard hard correction, but I think it's possible we will see a continuation of this trend all throughout the year. Money pouring in horizontally.

It's also odd in that for the first time (and only when I'm down) I could just barely possibly see a future where BTC does not go to the famous 1M. Not because crypto were unsuccesful, but rather the opposite, too much success, too much money wanting the join, too much FOMO.