Pre-2017
I always watched the digital currency markets since the beginning of trustless peer to peer crypto coins. From the beginning, as coins forked and grew, I observed that when the bitcoin price ran upward, other alternate coins lost value - like clockwork.
Let's call that "drainage" because it seemed like people were selling off everything they had in litecoin, darkcoin, ripple, and other altcoins in order to buy into the bitcoin rally. That is my theory as to why the phenomenon occurred.
The opposite would happen when bitcoin dropped. The alts would rally on the bitcoin drop as people wanted out of a falling bitcoin and used exchanges to trade their bitcoin for any and all alternatives.
Post-2017
When bitcoin got clogged and there were over a half million new transactions waiting to be recognized by the blockchain and coinbase was hobbing the knob of some politician somewhere in order to continue converting cash to coins, something changed. Bitcoin could run up to new ATH levels and the alts would delay a bit but follow, rallying with bitcoin. Let's call this "inflow" because paper money was more able to flow in to crypto markets. It is my theory that people did not need to keep everything on one side of the crypto/FIAT gateway. There were more options to buy with dollars.
So for the last four years or so, alts rose with bitcoin after a bit of a delay. Then they fell along with bitcoin with some delay.
All of the above is most relevant to large increases or plunges, mostly.
The Recent Rally
I have been focused on buying low value, high usability coins during my silent period here on Leo. I told you about most of the picks I have been dealing with. Continuing strategic dumps of hundreds of thousands of coins that popped up a bit like Doge and Shiba. It is a long process to dump large quantities because I set a mental floor where I stop dumping and wait it out. I also buy back some that were sold at higher prices. My original investment gained back years ago, just maximizing the dump without causing a price drop.
I am noticing a possible change from inflow movement to drainage movement recently. At least, it looks like the kind of environment we had pre-2017. I was watching the coins I hold and as bitcoin ran up this last 10k, I saw a flat period (delay) and I was ready to buy a lot of everything-not-bitcoin to catch the delayed-reaction rally. But what I am seeing are price drops in alts and shits.
This could be people draining out their non-bitcoin holdings in order to buy into the big daddy of coins. If so, we are probably headed for huge increases in bitcoin prices - maybe even the 100k or higher bitcoin price that everyone is talking about. It could also mean a start of the highly profitable drainage environment.
In this environment, I dump bitcoins for alts.
Recently I was using mid-60k bitcoin to purchase $620 bitcoin cash, $170 litecoin, $1.90 part, and hopefully some fifty cent Hive. I would like to have some liquid Hive to buy more Leo and POB.
I have only drained my hot bitcoin wallets. This could just be a delayed rise in reaction (of false alarm) in which case all my buys will be reversed as bitcoin comes back down. As bitcoin hits new all time dollar values, I am moving cold storage to hot in order to pick up some land or other assets in order to get me through the next lull.
I have also found a USDT wallet that has not failed to function and will be putting a chunk there to preserve the high sixty thousand dollar range for later sale if news organizations attempt to cause fear and doubt in crypto again. They seem to ignore important news in order to attempt to control the emotions of people lately. What do you think of all this?