All crashes are like that, people never learn. History repeats itself, over and over again. And most people will never learn.
I think it's too soon to be drawing so stiff conclusions about what is going on... If this thing is indeed like other crashes, it has a huge chance of going all the way back up and more... And all the bashers in here will be again calling for "how crazy this is" and sucking their fingers like crying babies...Again...
@johnarb since you think BTC is the greatest medium invented (although you were comparing it to stock certificates ! certificates ?!) can you answer S2007S's question ?
There are many sell signals along the way that turn out to be false signals in hindsight. 20K was one, so was 16, 13, 10, 8, 6, 5, 3 and so on. In a long term upward trend where average daily gains is positive, odds are against you when it comes time to pick a sell price if you intend to get back into the trade. The mathematically correct choice is to not sell.
Possible daily returns can be expressed as a percentage. The average of these outcomes is higher than 0%, meaning every day that you are long, on average, your will have more than 0% daily return. Selling with the intention of buying back is the same as naked short selling with no intention of being long. For a short seller, the average daily return is the exact opposite which is less than 0% daily return. This means that if you sell and hope to buy back lower, you might end up in a situation where the daily returns have a string a positive gains, making it that much harder for the price to come back to a profitable level. For example, selling at 2.5K last year and seeing price go all the way to 20K. Selling without the intention of buying back is a different position since you will take the money and never put it back in the instrument. In this case, future daily returns are meaningless. However, that's rarely in play except when you retire and decide to be out of the market entirely or you die.
Or not selling at 20K and see prices go where they are today. Each story can be used in both ways. It is clear that not selling was an error as today you could get in easily with a huge discount. It all comes down to: do you know when to act with a high probabilty to be right? For that you need a tradeplan that tells you what to do. Everybody will, every now and then, miss a winning trade. But more important is to miss the losing trades. If you miss more losses then wins you are OK. The longs got paralyzed by the fear to miss something. If you are in that state you can miss alot by trying not to miss something. That was proven the last week. They were afraid to miss the next move up, and they caught the move down.
Actually not. When AMD was weak, money went into NVDA, the market decided which one has the better future and such. In a sector (what cryptos would be) when one is weak that doesn't mean the others get weak too (sure it happens but that isn't the point). The point is that cryptos shouldn't move all together, the market should start to decide which one is the better and abandon the weak, yet the whole sector moves together all the time. And the explanation for that is very little fundamental value and lots of hype.