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Making sense of recent crypto hysteria

IRINA LITCHFIELD: "You see the challenge here is that we are once again going through a crypto winter and a lot of people do not want to admit it to themselves"

Let’s reflect on what’s been happening over the few days. We have been witnessing mass hysteria from a psychologically important, lowered BTC price.

As always, I will be stating my personal opinion here and basing my conclusions on my experience in the industry as well as own deductive reasoning.

I am going to start by rolling my eyes in a very exaggerated way. It should allow you to draw a clear picture of my standing on the nonsensical conspiracy theories, predictions of a fatal fall and other gibberish about Bitcoin.

We saw a somewhat dramatic drop in BTC price.  It seemed to trigger panic among media platforms. For months now, we have been watching the Bitcoin price ‘drag its feet’ and finally we observed a quick dip in price. At 6am on November 14, it was at $6,300. By 8pm it dropped to $5,700 (pardon my rounding as getting caught up in pure numbers – it adds too much complexity and is somewhat irrelevant to my point).

Apocalypse drop

Anyhow, that was a whopping 9% drop. For this particular asset, it is somewhat normal. I tried to count occurrences of 10% daily BTC price dips. I got bored when I counted past 30 and was not even halfway through its lifespan. As I was counting, I thought that more interesting data to provide you with would be the ‘apocalypse drop’ industry experienced on November 19 when the price of Bitcoin went from $900 to $360 in one day. And look at us, we are still here.

Think of the people who bought at the bottom of that day, we think of them as geniuses and, let’s face it, most of us wish we made that move as well. My point here is that by looking at lifetime trading chart of Bitcoin, it is simple to deduce that volatility is natural to this class of asset and yesterday’s and today’s outburst in the panic is illogical.

You see the challenge here is that we are once again going through a crypto winter and a lot of people do not want to admit it to themselves. They are hoping that the stall is short term and something or someone is about to do something that’s going to ‘moon’ to new highs. A great way to propel mindsets to unstable, irrational thinking and behaviour.

Now let us talk about the latest attention grabber. I am referring to the fight between Jesus/Judas vs Fake Satoshi. I am referring to Roger Ver/Jihan Wu vs Craig Wright, BCH ABC vs BCH SV. During this battle, Craig Wright (aka Fake Satoshi) announced that he is going to murder BTC, as if he has that power.

Motivated individuals

Please note that, in my opinion, even Satoshi herself/himself/themselves could not kill Bitcoin at this point. It appears that the battle I was referring to has two motivated individuals who are willing to take their fight to the point of last man standing, but let’s face it, the demise of either one of them is not enough to kill Bitcoin. Think of it this way: a gladiator and a weasel are fighting each other to death while threatening the life of the emperor. At the end of the day, their lives belong to the emperor altogether.

There is another rumour that’s been floating around. Supposedly major holders of BTC (Satoshis) will sell out their holdings completely, flood the market and thus bring bitcoin down, kill it.

Let’s dissect this one for a second. So suppose we start seeing a mass sell and the price starts dropping. There are plenty of wealthy people in the world who would like to get on ‘the crypto wagon’ at a favourable price – and happily will take huge allocations off the hands of these ‘Bitcoin whales’ – diversify their portfolio with this asset as to say. Let’s look at it from this perspective – total market cap of BTC now is a little below $100B, while the total combined personal net worth of billionaires is $9.1 trillion!

No-brainer

Our whole crypto market cap only recently got big enough to somewhat be interesting to real ‘whales’ of the world. Also, keep in mind, crypto ‘billionaires’ could not liquidate their BTC holdings to get their billions out. They would almost certainly have to sacrifice a “comma” and trust me, nobody wants to go from ‘$B’ to ‘$M.’ Think of all the rest of the world’s wealth out there. Taking big chunks of BTC allocation from crypto whales at a low price while they are clubbing each other to death is a total no-brainer.

While fools are panicking and feeding into the frenzy, buyers are silently placing purchase orders in hopes that this frenzy will lead to desirable price drop to fill those orders.

It is a bear market, so bear with it. Use logic, do not give into mass hysteria and conspiracy theories. Stay calm, be patient and keep on keeping on.

Let’s build new technologies and create new opportunities without destroying each other. Together we are strong, divided we fall.

Irina Litchfield

Founder of BlockchainCubed

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.

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