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Never Confuse Brains with a Bull Market: Bitcoin's Capitulation Phase

Over the previous week, bitcoin has declined a full 30 percent, marking a 78-percent decline from its peak back on December 17, 2017. 

 This hasn't kept the bitcoin bulls and hodlers from trying to sound smart.

 Faux crypto advisors still abound on YouTube, conducting spurious technical analyses and setting target buy-in prices for a speculative risk asset that is primarily owned and manipulated by a narrow segment of the population, that is visibly non-correlated against market developments, and that plainly lacks sufficient trading history and stability to support such public claims which serve exclusively as a platform for fame-hungry YouTubers to get in on the prediction front so they can look smart if the crypto asset, or cryptocurrency, trades accordingly. 

 Meanwhile, these talking heads have absolutely no idea about the asset's utility value, yet they stake claims about target levels which essentially operate from the yet-untested assumption of utility. 

 Moreover, the crypto bulls ironically contradict themselves in proposing lower guidance and buy-in targets within the present trading range. 

 Here’s why: 

 If bullish on the asset, there is no reason to wait for that nominal decline or to abstain from dollar-cost averaging into the trade, especially when measured against the expectation of future appreciation. 

 As such, those who encourage traders to abstain from buying at this level are tacitly admitting that they don’t really believe in the viability of the asset; they are merely speculating on its dollar-priced gyrations, movements that have proved to be unpredictable and non-correlated to market developments. 

 However, if the case for viability theoretically remains intact, then we are effectively talking about peanuts compared to the massive dollar-priced appreciation believed to be looming over the horizon, near the surface of the moon. 

 Unfortunately for crypto bulls, however, there are plainly no identifiers or signals of a bottom in sight, and the short-run momentum most closely resembles capitulation, not a "bottom" or a lucrative opportunity to buy the dip. 

 Ultimately, the same cases were made on and around the peak on December 17, 2017, when bitcoin eclipsed $20,000 for 30 minutes before embarking upon an impressive 78-percent decline to date. 

Bitcoin bulls and hodlers alike contended that the asset was headed to $100,000 and beyond, that everyone ought to buy the dip which ensued, that it was just a pullback before the next upward move. 

 Unfortunately, a segment of believers lost their savings on that single trade, whereas others amassed capital gains taxes they couldn't afford. 

 As such, many of those former believers and recent observers have become disillusioned by their losses, the precipitous decline and the spectacular volatility, and this psychology will limit the appetite of the average investor who doesn't have enough buying power to justify rolling the dice again on this bet: one that produces no dividend, that fails to store any value, that fails miserably as an efficient medium of exchange, and whose value remains completely dependent upon convincing a greater fool to buy it at increasingly higher prices.

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