Hi you!
Currently the capitalization of cryptocurrencies is forming a new record low for this year. Many people -including me- are trying to foresee were the price will be heading. Often that's motivated by a deep concern about what will happen to ones positions. So you try to predict where prices will be a week, a month, a year from now. Usually, in order to do so we look for similar patterns. Sounds easy? It kind of is. But only "kind of". The patterns reveal themselves, sometimes in the big picture, sometimes in the small picture and sometimes you have to even search for the right scale first.
To theoretical? Lets take a look at some statements:
- Currently the market is tumbling towards a new record low
- Marketcapital grew from 103 billion USD to 230 billion USD during the past 12 months
- Marketcapital excluding BTC grew from 61.5 billion USD to 132 billion USD during the past 12 months
- Marketcapital on Jan 1st 2016: >7 billion USD -> Jan 1st 2017 > 17.5 billion USD
- Marketcapital excluding BTC on Jan 1st 2016: > 600 million USD -> Jan 1st 2017 > 2.2 billion USD
Depending on when and where (meaning which currency) you joined the market; you will look at it in a very different way. If you joined during the hype you might consider yourself a very unlucky person. Judging by the evolvements of the past years this might stay like this for some time. On the other hand, the market did more than double its capital during each of the above mentioned timeframes.
Bringing up the question: Is the market realy bearish? Usually a doubling of price is not what can be considered a healthy growth. Also, mixing up all currencies dispite their different use-cases and their respective different natures ( smart-contracts, PoW, PoS) and tieing them to the BTC-price is not healthy either.
Economically speaking the substitutional character between ETH and BTC, does not work in both ways identically. In terms of payments both are in the same market, in terms of smart-contracts they are not.
Concerning the question above, it is not only the question of time-span, bullish or bearish, but also what market we are talking about.
Given the points explained above, you might want to be carefull about predictions. It is tough to make up those based on solid facts. Most of the time they might be (un-)lucky guesses.
There is but one thing that you can do to protect yourself and your investment: look closely on whitepapers, business-reports and news about the specific branch the cryptocurrency is targeting.
Yours JP