Today, December 17, marks the first anniversary of the current bear market.
Not really anything to celebrate, but maybe to look at what the reason for this is?
Something else happened on December 17 last year: the CME launched Bitcoin futures.
Do you think it's a coincidence that Bitcoin's price has continuously been going down ever since?
Why would you hang on to a real Bitcoin, when you can sell it for $20,000 and buy a futures contract in USD for a few thousand less? It's so much more convenient, too, to do everything through your trusted broker where you do everything else.
At least that's how traders think, who just want to profit from Bitcoin, but aren't interested in decentralisation and the actual world-changing-promise of Bitcoin at all.
And so, almost $650 billion have been sucked out of the crypto market since the beginning of the year. (OK some panic sellers helped as well, and whatever other manipulation is going on.)
Someone who has called this from the beginning was @Super_Crypto on Twitter (or @super.crypto1 on Medium). I highly recommend following this account.
If you want to read more on how exactly futures hurt Bitcoin, this is a helpful article.
The solution lies outside the crypto market
Nobody knows how long this bear market is going to continue, but many people agree that in order for a real shift to happen, something needs to happen outside the crypto market.
Whether that is the collapse of the US Dollar, or people simply losing more and more trust in their local currencies. People need to see the value of buying into the actual cryptocurrencies, and not just their derivatives.
While the collapse of the US Dollar is something most people maybe wouldn't want to hold their breath for - it may not be as far away or even impossible as you may think. The US Dollar in its current form is 47 years old, and the average life span of a fiat currency is only 27 years...
Even Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world, warns about the impending implosion of the US Dollar.
He mentions that history is repeating and we're seeing lots of signs that remind of the 1930's. That's something that astrologers have been saying since May, by the way, when the stars lined up in exactly the same way as they did in the 1930's. They've predicted huge shifts in the banking and money system over the coming years.
Let's see what the future brings... In any case, let's not give up on crypto. It's the only thing that can save us from things like this:
Indeed! As governments pass more laws turning businesses against their customers (KYC & AML, anti-encryption laws etc) and centralised businesses abuse their users (Facebook etc), more and more people will seek alternatives.
The Chinese social credit system has turned my opinion of China from relatively benign to quite negative. Its becoming a high-tech version of North Korea!
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