Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
The amount of time we are taking on these levels which are below 200 MA is what scares the shit out of me.
+1 to that. But to be fair it is a weekend. Which is why they dumped in the first place.
We were already in a channel more or less under 200 WMA, between about that and ~10% below. IMO, it had been doing that for long enough to be teetering on borderline breakage. I had been hoping for a scenario like August–September 2015—scraping along just below/just above for a month, then recovering. At this point, since we crashed even below the previous cycle top (even in nominal dollars, never mind real value!), I think that 200 WMA is quite dead. Not “Bitcoin is dead”: Excessive reliance on a technical indicator is dead.
Gold had a two-decade extreme bear market. Anyone who bought gold at the wrong time had to wait an awful lot longer than four years to be not underwater. I also think that was a politically motivated economic attack, though I don’t want to get into off-topic discussion here that will derail into other matters. (I have mentioned this in some prior post, a few weeks ago... Something about gold-producing countries under international sanctions.)
Only fools declared gold dead. Smart people bought gold as low as ~$260, not so very long ago.
If we can escape from erroneous thinking about Bitcoin as “like a stock”, and really start treating it as digital gold, then there is ample precedent for shrugging off much worse crashes and bear markets than I now anticipate. As bad as this one is. Even if we are still nowhere near the bottom—maybe; maybe not; I am realistically pessimistic, but not prepared to make a call either way.
The amount of time we are taking on these levels which are below 200 WMA is what scares the shit out of me.
Quote from: ImThour’s Personal Text
Low IQ Finds TA = Astrology.
FTFY. As an inveterate pedant, I could not resist.
The previous cycle high was the *last* piece of TA that BTC chart had not violated previously. ... It was an almost religious symbol to some ppl.
Now that violation has happened, individuals have to make their decision... either say:
1. ' this indicates some serious imminent unknown, so BTC is broken in some way'
or 2. ' No form of TA applies anymore, so HODL as an act of pure faith'
Gold historical comparison is a helpful justification for (2), which is probably the line most WO posters would take.
I have been calling the death of these TA supposed bottoms for awhile now. And I have been urging for years that Bitcoin needs to decouple from stocks, and couple firmly to gold and other PMs as an asset class. Comparing this crash to a spectacular gold crash is only logical and natural for my perspective on Bitcoin.
Do we call this “digital gold”? Well, let’s treat it as “like gold”!
Thereupon, I do NOT urge to “HODL as an act of pure faith”. No way!
Some of my recent posts have mentioned refocusing on Bitcoin’s fundamental value. In lieu of an in-depth exploration, here are a few points of cold realism, not “pure faith”:
- Hardcapped on the supply side. Market is young, very far from saturating on the demand side. Emphasis on demand: Some Bitcoiners are fixated excessively on the supply side, without adequately considering the other side of “supply and demand”.
Seriously, does anyone here believe that Bitcoin will not have long-term demand that bids up a strictly limited supply, far above current price levels? In my opinion, that will only happen—only can happen if Bitcoin really dies. Bitcoin is one of those visionary ideas that needs either to die, or to take over the world! - Honest economics. Whether or not it is theoretically ideal, Bitcoin’s POW system is fair. It is not based on financial manipulation. It constrains rich miners to operate on razor-thin profit margins, and to work hard for their money. Miners being forced to dump to pay their electricity bills is a positive feature: It gives new small investors a fair chance at the new supply!
POS is intrinsically corrupt—corrupt by design. By its very nature, it is a manipulative financial scheme for the rich to get richer. Period.
(Aside, in principle, I am not against reasonable seigniorage for financial innovators. But it needs to be honest and fair. POS is not. POS coins tend to be even worse than a premine for hiding how it fills the wallets of founders and their VC backers, at everyone else’s expense.)
This is not “Bitcoin maxi” hate for anything not Bitcoin. I currently still hold some POS coins amidst the smoking wreck of my remaindered assets. I never liked POS, but I was willing to compromise with it—I was, until I got some hands-on, real-life experience with just how bad it is.
I have been intending to write some essays exploring this (on their own threads and/or on other websites, not in WO). Will do sometime after I recuperate...
By the way, some of my current POS holdings are things that I would have preferred to dump to save my BTC. Having money locked up in stake, and therefore never available when I needed it—ouch. Worse: A chunk of my remaining assets is locked up in stake somewhere that I will need to pay high fees to get it out. When the market crashed very suddenly and my BTC was teetering on the brink of liquidation, I could not afford to spend money I didn’t have for fees, and then wait a week or more to recover liquid money. So... Almost all of my BTC is now gone, but I still have those other coins. Ouch.
- Trustworthy technical foundation. Most investors lack the expertise to evaluate this. I have that expertise. Moreover, unlike most people here, I have experience in altcoinland; and I have no general anti-altcoin bias, or hatred towards altcoins. I sincerely want (or in some cases, have previously wanted) some altcoin projects to succeed.
But when I compare Bitcoin Core to altcoins—wow, there is no comparison. As of today, there is only one cryptocurrency which I would personally use to store my life savings, i.e. money I can’t afford to lose—or where I would feel comfortable storing >$1 billion in value, if I had it. I would entrust any realistic amount of value to Bitcoin, without fear that my money may be hacked or lost by a software bug.
Many altcoins have interesting features. I enjoy those. When I come back to Bitcoin, Bitcoin seems slow, clunky, old-fashioned—and oh so reliable and trustworthy! When I peruse the Github repositories of some major altcoins, I want to run screaming back to Bitcoin Core’s first-class, best-in-class security and software engineering. Bitcoin is serious financial software.
In this analysis, a very few altcoins seem solid to me. Very few. Actually, off the top of my head, I can only think of one in my personal experience that I firmly trust not to lose my money in some “whoopsie”. It is based on Bitcoin Core, its developers often cherry-pick patches from upstream Core, and it has a much slower pace of development than many of the newer-generation altcoins. “Slower” here means “a major upgrade was repeatedly delayed—ultimately delayed for over seven months—because it needed more time in development and testing, before being put into production on mainnet”. No move-fast-and-break-things.
Maybe some of the snazzier altcoins will eventually mature to become serious financial software. Maybe... someday. Meanwhile, it sometimes frightens me how much money people are entrusting to those contraptions. I have no such worries about Bitcoin Core.
Buy $1 billion worth of BTC, put it in cold storage, and sleep quietly at night. That is my expert opinion as a programmer.
This list can and should be continued sometime.
I don’t do “faith”. I repudiate the whole concept of “faith”. My long-term belief in Bitcoin is based on value fundamentals, not “faith”. And those fundamentals remain intact, even with 200 WMA dead as a Bitcoin Bottom. TA is astrology based largely on faith. Bitcoin does not need it!