Global market cap of all cryptos is in a subtle down-trend from the high on June 14th of 2017. However, most people have not viewed this downtrend with great trepidation or as a bear market. One reason for this is likely because the market had gone up so far prior to the downtrend. Also, even today, it is only slightly off the highs of two weeks ago, sitting at 105 bil market cap. compared to the 116 market cap which was reached previously. This latest dip down to 91 billion is roughly a 21% decline from the tip top of the market. This is not so bad even in traditional markets like the stock market.
In some ways, without a more sizeable crash, it may not be appropriate to call this a dead cat bounce. While it certainly may be one from a technical analysis standpoint, it appears to me to be a more of a sideways, leaning down correction, rather than a crash.
These types of market corrections are difficult to gauge when they happen because the bulls are wrong, and the bears are also wrong. The bears, fearing a crash generally cause the end of this type of consolidation, where they have one last selling hurrah, after which point "We are clearly in a bear market, get ready for a crash" meaning negativity has fully penetrated the market mentality of anyone willing to be negative, thus causing a bottom well before any serious crash occurs. Real crashes happen in a panic when the market "can't crash any further".
On this latest blip up, I have perceived people being positive about the cryptocurrency market. Even observing myself, it feels good to have crypto just off of the highs. Emotion is an important observation for gauging near-term market events such as tops and bottoms. Near-term it is hard for me to gauge if our last dip was the bottom of this consolidation, or just a dead-cat bounce to new lows. What I can say is my viewpoint is that for bitcoin specifically, if it touches back to $2,000, I believe it will garner considerable outside investment supporting the price and also helping support the market.
Long-term what I know is this: Cryptocurrency is in its infancy.
Even for the "Cryptocurrency Bubble", we have not seen this bubble yet. It has only just begun. I say this for multiple reasons:
Cryptocurrencies are scrambling to implement 'standard ideas' based on blockchain. Steemit, for example, is just a traditional blog linked with blockchain, but implemented very well. All the standard ideas have not been built yet, meaning there just has not been enough time to develop the things that the free market wants to develop, meaning the technology available for blockchain 3 years from now, will be much greater with a larger audience than exists today.
New ideas are launching cryptocurrencies to the next level of implementation. EOS is the best example, but other examples include BAT (even if it doesn't succeed). These projects are the bleeding edge of innovation in cryptocurrency, meaning it is still relatively easy to innovate within this market place. This also means, we should expect innovation to continue for more than 5 years. The internet which began in the late 80's only began to exhaust its innovation in the last 10 years, with the dominance of Google and Facebook. Everyone wanted to invent the next Facebook, but the new place to innovate has to be different in some way, not a rehash of traditional technology with the same features or less. Cryptocurrency makes that new world of innovation, and like game-changers that have come before it, the big guys are too slow to adopt, making it a prime landscape for entrepreneurs.
Bubbles happen over years, not 3 months. If a bubble forms over a 3 month period, then that means it can fully crash in 3 months, and be back into a bull market into new highs within 12 months... so true bubbles can't form in 3 months for a revolutionary technology. Legend has it people were calling for the dot-com bubble to pop in 1995, after which the NASDAQ went up 500% in the years that followed.
The Cryptocurrency Bubble will make the dot-com bubble look small. The reason for this is, the-dot com bubble existed under traditional capital restrictions, which was limited to sophisticated, first world investors, favoring those in the USA. Cryptocurrencies do not exist under these limitations. ICO's garner worldwide investment. On one of my livestreams, I was chatting with a working class person in India who was investing in crypto.
1 Trillion Market Cap, HERE WE COME!
In one of my first videos, I outlined how I believe cryptocurrency would trade in the trillions in market capitalization. I made this call when crypto was still under 30 billion market capitalization. Some people think I am nuts when I say things like, "Ripple could hit a trillion market cap."
The reason I see the market this way is because cryptocurrencies are currencies, not stocks. Stocks are limited by corporate management, corporate capital, revenues, and so on. Currencies are limited only by the people using them to transact. They have no profitability model. If more people use and hold the currency, the value of that currency on the market increases. It is a simple and predictable dynamic. It has less failure points than the average company exchanging on Wall Street. Due to it having less failure points, you could even call crypto a "safer investment" once we understand that the price swings are more substantial because the marketplace is young.
Stocks are worth 69 trillion worldwide, total (last I checked). Cryptocurrency exchanging up into the trillions is not far-fetched, but inevitable.