To me, floating profit is real profit, just like floating profit in any other trade. However the cryptos are different from stocks/commodities in that all the markets are highly cornered... the biggest BTC has 4% of wallets owning more than 95% of the coins.... the alt-coins probably have even higher concentration.... which is why these things all move together, up/down by 10+% 24 hours... only possible when these moves are just large wallets trading with each other... true public supply/demand can never do this - in stock/commodity market, 1,2,3% moves are considered big things. So in that sense you are right - the market cap is very misleading.... if only 10% of btc are in mom&pop's hands, and at the peak the cap was about $300b, this means the ponzi has scammed about $30b from the public.
Will be waiting for the day when half of those 90% early miners (including Satoshi) come cashing out. That's when the real crash will come.
But I do say it with conviction. Much conviction. My logic is what I have expressed many times in other threads and the fact is Bitcoin has done this several other times in its history. In fact I would not be surprised to see it not reach bottom until about $4,000 in October or so. I would also not be surprised to see the $6500 support hold and a new bull launches from there. Also in response to @dozu888 I do not see this at all like a one and done tulip mania and gone forever in the wind. Bitcoin will be an important financial asset from now to the end of time as we now know it. I say it now loud and clear, perhaps so I can brag about it later, Bitcoin will see new highs above the $20,000 Dec high.
The 'several other times in history' were different, without the public mania we saw in the Dec high.... you are talking about bitcoin IRAs and such... once the mom&pops have been sucked dry, there will be no more fresh meat to grind.
Floating profit in any other trade are no real profits too. The price you get when you exit your position is the only moment you can speak about profit/loss. At that moment everything is final and cannot change anymore. Then the result is final. When BTC was at 20K only those who sold got out at that price and made profit. Everybody who stayed in till today, can only sell at the price of today. Roughly 10K lower. So they never made the huge profits at 20K as they did not sell.
Let's do some simple math: If 4% have 95% of these crypto's, it means that 96% small holders have only 5%. So if the 95% should be absorbed by the mass, the existing 96% small holders should increase on average their position by 20 times. I think that this is impossible. So the 4% who hold 95% have a huge problem. They cannot get ride of their wallets.
I've tried not to comment on this as it's very hard to explain to someone who doesn't know how bitcoin works. Look into the concept of change addresses. As bitcoin is used more for commerce and transfer of value, the adoption creates an exponential amount of change addresses that contain minimal (i.e. .000x or .00x or .0x, or .0000x) amount of btc's. These are the majority of the addresses that you see. I have 5 electrum wallets that I use for various purposes. They have well over a hundred bitcoin addresses as part of the highly-deterministic wallet (same behavior in bitcoin-qt wallets), and these addresses contain minimal amounts. None of the wallets contain more than 1 bitcoin. So you see how your analysis is skewed. I am but one example, multiply my case by hundreds of thousands. Don't take my word for it. Spend a couple of hundred $ and get yourself an electrum wallet and see how it works or if you don't want to, you can continue to spout false information thinking you know what you're talking about. https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html
You make a transference that is not true. 4% of PEOPLE do not hold 95% of the Bitcoins. This is an intentional misleading to cause FUD amid the sheep. Statistics can be used to convey falsehoods. When they talk about 4% of addresses they do not tell you that most addresses are empty and done forever and a huge amount of addresses have such a small amount in them that they are abandoned as their value is a small fraction of a cent. I and a couple of my friends probably have 500 addresses just between the 3 of us.
So your logic is, it has been done 4 times so there must be a 5th time too. But where does this end? What is the X times when the ATH is reached? Obviously it can not go up forever...