I'm sure the naysayers will come up with yet another narrative for why the next bubble is "fake" too
Fake or not, as long as we can make dough, it's okay with me (more or less). With that said, though, what makes you think that the previous bubbles were not "fake" enough? Willy the Bot or Bitfinex the Tethers doesn't cut it, or what?
The price action. Take the 2013 bubble. It started going parabolic around $12. After the bubble popped, the price never returned below
$150. If all that demand were "fake" then why did price never return to $12 and below? Clearly between 2013 and 2015, real demand had increased significantly to keep prices so high
I mostly agree with this observation
I had been sticking around back in the day. In fact, I got to know crypto since October 2013 (due to Coinbase ads all over the place), and I'm 100% sure that I was not the only one who became aware of Bitcoin around that time (as it had been only about Bitcoin at the time). So the 2013 rally was definitely due to explosive demand, some part of which stayed after Billy had kicked the bucket
You can run the same exercise with the 2017 bubble. If it were "fake" then why is the market trading at $7K right now? Why not sub-$1200, or $0?
This is where I tend to disagree
If we analyze the price action in 2015-2017, we will see that Bitcoin started to rise in the fall of 2015 from below 200 dollars. Then halving had come, and the real price action began in late 2016 and early 2017, i.e. before Bitfinex started to pump the market with tethers. And in late 2018 we crashed to lower 3k's, basically to square one if you ask me (read, we shouldn't really take current prices as a point of reference)
I disagree. Real buyers meeting real sellers on the order book is as real as it gets. That's real price discovery, which is all that matters
You don't know if the demand is real. Besides, even if it is, it doesn't mean that the growth is not speculative in and of itself, which is what makes it a bubble