Yes!
I am still bearish. The recent news is just fuel to the fire that I have seen as possible for over a year now. It may make my C-wave chart come to fruition sooner than I recently thought, even a couple of weeks ago. If the market takes it as a severe enough situation, then 352.50 will be broken, the triangle wasn't actually a triangle and we be doomin'. ETH goes up more and extends the pump.
If the 352.50 level holds (preferably higher if it's going to) then we get triangle completion, a thrust wave as high as 700 +/- a bit, and completion of the bear market counter trend (suckers rally) for wave-B (or X) and we see continuation of the bear trend (not necessarily breaking 100$, but it is possible). I don't see ATH's this year.
Thanks for your thoughts. What is your long term view going out over the next several years? When do you expect the next ATH? I think it will be some time yet, not least because great expectations for the halving should bring great disappointment in this ruthless market.
I think the blocksize issue is holding down price not because blocks are full (the 7 day average is only at 75.66% at the moment) but because of the uncertainties of governance and protocol development. Also the halving brings further uncertainty because of fears of decreased hash rate causing miners to drop out resulting in difficulty adjustment issues. In that way this halving does not exactly parallel the previous one, as at that time hash rate was very likely set to increase due to the switch to ASICs.
We also should see ETH either succeed or fail very publicly. I bet on the latter.
Some interesting circumstances were pointed out in that article, that tells me it has become a very serious issue if not addressed in the very short future. If price doesn't rise before the halving, mining will not be profitable and the network could see the same problem Namecoin saw in 2012 when it was mined so heavily that difficulty rose to extremely high levels (at the time) and nearly abandoned causing blocks to take days and retargets to take months. If the decision hadn't been made to merged mine it along side Bitcoin, it would have surely died. The problem here is that there is no coin bigger to save Bitcoin. If this scenario happens, we will be in unknown territory. The fear of this scenario is enough to make some seek to exit completely and others to head for alts with seemingly promising futures. Some of this fueled ETH, I'm sure.
I feel ETH is another "right place at the right time" pump as LTC was in June/July last year. In LTC's case, pumpers knew it was approaching the halving so there would be plenty of speculation helping drive it, and Bitcoin slumping/stagnating just drew in traders since there was something with movement. In ETH's case, Bitcoin has the threat outlined above coupled with a relentless group behind the pump and new developments which may or maynot prove useless once released. I feel ETH will eventually see a spectacular crash the likes of which only crypto can offer and the lead group coming out vastly richer in BTC terms than previously. Many butt hurt investors will leave crypto as was the case with any Bitcoin crash in the past.
I have traded ETH exactly opposite of Bitcoin since polo first offered it. This has not change, even today. BTC up, ETH down... ETH up, BTC down. When The ETH pumpers get done fleecing ETH fish, Bitcoin will come back to life, break out of this consolidation and move up in it's thrust wave, except in the case (again) outlined in the first paragraph.
As for a Bitcoin ATH?
First and foremost, there needs to be a permanent fix to the blocksize issue and more generally, the practices of the Bitcoin dev teams. SegWit is not a fix and may introduce more problems considering it has a massive new code base. With lots of code, comes lots of potential bugs/errors. Personally, I don't think it's a fix, only a band-aid.
Second, I don't think new adoption is as high as many would like to believe. As long as huge amounts of new money isn't pouring in, no new ATH. Bulls haven't been beaten enough to panic so are all-in, and have no significant amount of money to buy the price up. Again, no new money, price doesn't rise. We need to go down before halving, get a massive deleveraging of market participants, and a fear to buy, so that when it does begin to rise, there is money to move it.
The second part being the psychological aspects to how trends and more specifically, EW works. No trend==corrective movement which is what we are seeing since January 2015.
Sorry for the long winded post! I don't have a TL;DR either... Just read it
If Morecoin would like me to delete this for the OT nature, just let me know and I will.
