Bitcoin: $8,741.00
Market Cap: $352,995,390,608
It’s not just me that’s been sick for the last three days, the entire crypto market has been vomiting up its insides in an extraordinary combination of events. Only a couple of days after posting that the entire crypto world was heavily manipulated, we experienced a bunch of regulation FUD from the US and Japan which, as usual, points towards good news for the space, as well as a Binance ‘hack’ which wasn’t a hack at all but was instead the result of some people falling victim to a phishing scam and finally the news that a Mt. Gox trustee had been selling off HUGE amounts of BTC, over the past few weeks/months, with each sale resulting in a dropoff in the price of BTC from the $19k peak. It’s no coincidence whatsoever that these came at the same time, dropping the price to $8k when all the signs were it was going to push through $12k. At no point though have I been confident that the bull run was starting, but this final downwards leg I think may represent the bottom, given the amount of FUD that has come out in such a short space of time. There could of course be more on the horizon, but I feel a little more confident that, in the words of Winston Churchill:
‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
Seeing as I suspected this final dump I sold all my BTC and any remaining alts with liquidity (apart from my masternode coins and my TRAC) for FIAT and set a buy order for $8k when everyone was saying it was more likely to push up to $11k. I missed the buy order by about $300, but still managed to buy back in at $8.5, netting me a little more BTC in the process. The sentiment is still quite bullish, but again it goes to show that whoever has the ability to crash the market like this is no respecter of bullish sentiment!
Another interesting development was that VEN announced a revamp of their THOR rewards program, which more or less shafted my alt buying plans; they offered a lower masternode and bumped up what was the lowest node (the one I had) up a level, requiring me to buy another 6,000 VEN in order to achieve what I already had. Initially this pissed me off, but in the long term it works out better as if I hold them to the mainnet release in June (which I was going to do anyway) then I get upgraded to the rewards of the next level up without having to buy an extra 40,000 VEN. So in theory this is good news, but it means that my alt buying power has been massively reduced to about 1 BTC, so I have to be very careful not to lose out when trading to FIAT and back, although I think I’ve stopped doing that now. At the moment an alt run is so far from my mind as to be invisible, and my outlook on the market has shifted considerably – where I used to think about long term quality projects I’ve realised I just need to slum with the shitcoins and buy up what will pump the most in the run. I’ll probably pick up some medium term coins at the same time, but I need to maximise my buying power in the short term.