The bear market was actually closer to 3 years. But that ended a while back. It's now solidly in a bull market.
Bitcoin is fantastic. But even fantastic assets can become overvalued. And indeed, this will happen again. There will be another bear market.
I keep myself up to date on the market sentiment every day. I have been doing this for years now. The current sentiment is that we are in the middle of the bull market. Both billionaires as well as retail buyers have only just arrived.
Everything is going much, much higher for at least the rest of the year.
If the market cycle repeats like last time, the bull market will last at least the larger part of this year.
If the cycle is lengthening, as you'd expect when market cap grows larger, then the current bull rally will last longer still: say... to the end of 2022.
The question is: are we currently at the knee of a larger S-curve?
If so, then we are truly witnessing a rare event, in which asset appreciations will truly blow us off our socks.
In such an event, bitcoin would become too scarce for it to do another 85% retrace, which is what it's done in previous market cycles.
(Any by the way... the 30-40% figure are considered normal retraces, of which we usually have multiple during a larger bitcoin bull run.)
Billionaire Michael Saylor from Microstrategies is saying that he's not selling. Billionaires are, in this regard, different from retail, who do sell.
The only way to estimate bottoms and tops successfully, is to be right on top of it every day of every week.
The real estate & bitcoin comparison is apples & oranges.
Real estate existed (and still exists) in a world of inflationary government IOUs (read: fiat). People were taking out too many & too large loans. Ofcourse it was going to go bust. People were talking about it. The author of the book he linked, was being a contrarian.
Bitcoin has created its own reality, which has only just started to gain traction. It's the early days of the dot com boom. It's the early days of SEO.
Every informed individual sees the writing on the wall. Something doesn't grow for 12 years straight, unless it's got something interesting going on.
To state that bitcoin is going away, is the equivalent of stating that the Internet is just a fad that will soon die out. It's an inherently contrarian view.
Fiat is at the end of its lifespan. People are seeking refuge in bitcoin now. It's deflationary by design, which makes it an excellent store of value. It's value has only been going up for 12 years straight now. No bubble to be seen here.
The crypto market is now just gettings its first billionaires to invest in it (Michael Saylor, Elon Musk, GrayScale, etc.), and the market cap is still small. This is just getting started.
Hacker News is indeed being overrun by a too large amount of irrational bitcoin FUD.
The energy 'argument' is easily debunked. But that's not what this comment is about, so I won't rehash it here.
Trying to change people's minds on here doesn't work. But you know what? That's okay!
It signals us bitcoin holders how incredibly early we are in this life changing monetary revolution, that we are seeing unfold before our very eyes.
Bitcoin was meant to be attacked from all angles, non stop. It's what makes it so resilient.
If it can fail, it must fail.
But it's not failing, is it?
Quite the opposite...
Every bitcoin newcomer who reads this FUD, is going to remember it years from now, when bitcoin is still around and at higher prices than ever.
And they'll think to themselves... "Well, if after all these years, bitcoin is still around, despite supposedly being a bad thing, then it might not be such a bad thing after all!".
So I say:
Let they naysayers attempt to take bitcoin down. It will only result in new all time highs for my portfolio. And for that, I am grateful.
The early bird gets the worm. The late ones convince themselves the worms are poisonous, leaving more worms for the early birds.
As per Satoshi himself, the value of bitcoin increases because people speculate, start using it more, speculate more, start using it more, etc.
The reason why it is capable of increasing, is because the number is fixed. Inflation would outstrip its value, if it weren't.
Bitcoin is useful. It has organic support. When it comes to storing value, other coins do not matter (nearly as much). Just ask PayPal, Mastercard, Microstrategies, Tesla, JP Morgan, GrayScale, etc.
2. Like with every solution suggested in the bitcoin ecosystem, LN attracts a lot of FUD. The weakness you observe in LN seems to me like arguing in 1995 we'll never be able to stream movies via the Internet. "X Doesn't exist now, so it never will.". Present this argument to one of LN's creators, and they'd likely wipe it off the table.
The fact of the matter remains that any scaling solution has 2 minimum requirements:
A. It needs to be done off-chain.
B. All transactions need to be verifiable from the genesis block.
LN satisfies these 2 conditions. If you'd design LN from the ground up, you'd probably end up with LN again. Just like you'd end up with bitcoin again, if you'd design that from the ground up. So these solutions will have to do.
3. Just because PayPal doesn't support this now, it doesn't mean they won't support it in the future. Matter of fact, it's fairly likely they will. Once again... "X Doesn't exist now, so it never will" is an inadequate argument.
I invest hundreds of hours per year studying bitcoin's development, the crypto markets, etc. But you think your opinion somehow weighs more than mine, eh?
Ignore Lightning Network's development at your own peril.
Increased and decreased interest are part of the normal market cycle, the chart of which I'm betting you don't know by heart.
You have to be extremely & wilfully ignorant to claim 'medium of exchange' is off the table, just now that PayPal & Mastercard are embracing cryptocurrencies.
But whatever, man. You don't wanna belong to the future's 1%, that's fine with me.
Far too pessimistic. It's likely not taking into account any acceleration.