I posit that all these games with HIVE/STEEM are insignificant compared to what Bitcoin does. I have a hunch that come April and May, a lot of retail investors are going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to be able pay for rent/mortgage/food/car. It'll get progressively worse as the year goes by. STEEM and HIVE will be around 1000 satoshis at the end of the summer and BTC will be at $3000.
Unless the average Bitcoin investor has enough fiat to be able to buy every dip, of course.
Market cap is a really poor measure of worth for a coin because it's nothing but the spot price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation. It could evaporate very quickly.
Cryptocurrencies have been too dependent on the dollar and other centralized fiat currencies, meaning even more volatility in a bear market, the great global economic depression of 2020 which is happening right now. So, Bitcoin is following the dollar. Things are going down. The stock market has been going down. It's worse than the great depression of the late 1920's and early 1930's in the United States but internationally now. I hope Bitcoin can become independent of the dollar to the extent that gold might be. Someday, maybe. But for now, I hope some people can try to buy on this dip. The hard part is knowing how far down this dip will be. The only thing harder is surviving through this depression. More people can die from the depression than they will from the 2019 Novel Corona Virus, possibly. So, it can be very tough for many people to hold onto their cryptocurrency investments long-term speaking, like you said. But those who could somehow buy during this dip could make a lot of money, long-term speaking, ten years down the road or more. I would not be a day-trader. Too dangerous. Too risky.
Bitcoin does rule the market, to be sure.
However, this entire crisis is a wildcard.
People like me are scrambling to get more Bitcoin because this is what it was designed for.
Those who panic sold at $4k are already seeing they are down 50%. Oops!
The halving event is also a wildcard at this point.
We didn't get a speculative pump/dump.
Say the economy opens in early May, then the block reward gets cut in half...
There's no telling what might happen.
The only certainty is volatility (uncertainty).
I think the block reward halving will not have an immediate effect as it never really has had. The influx of new supply will get cut from four to two percent annually. It will support the price but a lot will depend on the demand side as well. I'm afraid the demand side will take a serious blow from the economic crisis we have seen the beginning of.
The long-term prospects of Bitcoin remain unaffected. But I think this crisis will show the world that Bitcoin and the rest of the space has its work cut out for it in terms of increasing adoption.
If we can get people to work for Hive that comes out of somebody's wallet and not the inflation pool, then HIVE will have become a real currency and not just a speculative vehicle.
In all the 2 times that it's happened? The fact that it's never spiked on halving day is just as good a reason to assume it will. The market is a chaotic speculative nightmare.
Yes, the fundamentals of the halving can't kick in until time has passed, but this crisis has pushed back the speculative hype cycle that everyone was expecting to see. Has that pump/dump been eliminated, or is it lurking? Guess we'll find out.
Oh, it might spike. But this market is not completely chaotic. The supply crunch brought about by the halving manifests over a long period of time. There simply is no reason why it should cause a massive rally right out of the gate. The number of newly minted bitcoins in proportion to the entire trading volume is quite small. A rally might take place but without any fundamentals to support it, profit taking will result in a crash at some point. However, when 12-18 months pass, traders will feel the impact of the increased scarcity. That is, assuming that demand hasn't changed. The rising price will drive a larger, delayed speculative rally. Much of the market already knows this, which is why we saw the mid-2019 pump. But the fundamentals weren't there to support it.
I think we have already seen the beginning of the impact of the spanner the crisis has thrown in the works. I think it's likely that there will be a change in Bitcoin's appreciation schedule. I'd love to be wrong, though.