I have 3 steps left to my ladder down to 16K. No more fiat money until the end of the month, unfortunately.
I think it is EXTREMELY interesting and possibly important that this is what the mempool looks like:
Seems both good and bad.
Just like the rise to 60k+ the fall back to here (and further?) is NOT because of retail. So why IS it happening? Who is doing the selling, and where? I think Torques post above is relevant. Some ideas:
-This is absolute proof of rehypothication. Coins are not even being traded on chain in significant amounts.
-Retail may or may not be buying or selling. But they are NOT taking custody.
-The businesses BUILT on paper bitcoin are dying in SPITE of the above.
Thing is those people are using the tried and true fiat system tricks to churn value out of the system. But bitcoin is different than the fiat system so they are getting ruined by it one by one. This hurts the entire ecosystem, really. But it is 100% necessary.
This is what I hope we end up seeing:
1. People trusting scammers with their bitcoin will lose it.
2. Then More and more people will begin to take custody of their bitcoin, or at least trust a custodian that is not lying.
3. The scammy paper trading services will get liquidated.
4. GOTO 1
This is a vicious cycle with a virtuous end effect.
I'm trading and not taking custody. My main stash I hodl. Trading is to increase the stash, I make a transfer to a wallet once in a while, but since I'm not earning that much, I can leave that on the exchange. Said exchange has considerably lowered its fees to get BTC so I might do more, smaller transfers, though.
I suspect retail selling the dip are mostly people who don't own a wallet at all and only use websites/apps.
The whales doing the majority of the trading might or might not hold coins, they could be playing with fiat only. That's clearly a problem with crypto's lack of rules, there is nothing preventing someone with big bucks to manipulate them. Short sell 5000 coins at 20K, the sell crashes it to 18K, buy back slowly at an average of 19K => 5 million profit. Rinse, and repeat.
