Just curious:
Am I the only person who hates the way everyone uses "cycles"?
"In this part of the cycle.."
or the truly puke inducing:
"Well this is my third cycle.."
We never used to talk like this. Get off my lawn 😄
Discussion
that’s because there wasn’t history yet!
Yeah but *cycles*. It's nonsense.
(Talking about price of course, not halvings. I guess i opened Pandora's box, efficient markets..) but even other-coiners use this language..
it’s true that humans are simple, pattern matching machines
i get annoyed that discovering antibiotics convinced humans they could cure cancer (which tbf we’ve made very good progress on but man the hubris on display there lmao)
I didn't/don't understand the connection to antibiotics but that's a really good point about cancer.
"Cure" does seem like entirely the wrong concept.
I think the book Emperor of Maladies had some good tidbits the amount of gvt money allocated to cancer research soon after the antibiotics miracle happened, it was staggering
The term developed, I think, because the rest of non-Bitcoin crypto also goes in cycles. Many of those folks aren’t really all that aware of the Bitcoin halving, even though the usual pattern is a Bitcoin price spike post-halving, then some of that money rotates into ETH/etc as the Bitcoin run-up loses steam, then as the ETH/etc run-up loses steam the shitcoin/memecoin/garbage pump starts.
Lots of the ETH/memcoin bros don’t really think about Bitcoin’s halving so they just see a cycle, even though it’s driven by Bitcoin.
sort of insane to think the bitcoin supply might just come to define consumer economic cycles
Bitcoin preventing the post-high-interest-rates 2025 recession that everyone is predicting would be kinda wild.
Wait, how would it prevent a recession? I guess it could impose discipline on monetary policy, but wouldn't that result in higher interest rates (tending in direction of 'austerity'), so more recession?
Sudden distribution of cash to a bunch of people could cause a nontrivial bump in spending, offsetting the crash in spending being predicted due to layoffs and other economic headwinds. It was mostly a joke, though, I don’t think there’s that many people with that much bitcoin trying to sell that much bitcoin with that much demand for bitcoin…
can't really blame people for thinking in "cycles" while the pattern remains undefeated
What exactly annoys you? You could also replace ‘cycle’ with ‘bullmarket’ and given that this stuff seems to ‘repeat’ using the word ‘cycle’ does not seem all that strange. Is it the assumed determinism behind the word?
Yeah it's the presumption of predictability. The psychological safety of knowing it will go back up after it goes down. You know nothing of the sort.
well, sure, i guess. But please keep in mind that (fuck you i will use cycles because up until now it obviously has been cyclical) if you have been in Bitcoin for a few cycles, it is all so much easier. The anxiety of people who fairly recently got into bitcoin given all the volatility forces their monkey brains to look for something to hold on to. And because every cycle the amount of new people coming into 'the space' grows, their mindset makes up a large part of the narrative. 'Conviction' is easy when you are already up a gazillion %. Also these people are obviously not 'in it for the tech' people like us, otherwise they would have been here early on. So they rely on stupid shallow talking points to constitute their Bitcoin understanding, and in the back of their mind they probably are aware of this.
Dont be too hard on these people.
Or in other words, don't be a Bitcoin snob.
Be a Bitcoin aristocrat instead, and understand the sorrows of the small folk
Don't assume everyone who's been involved for a long time is "up a gazillion %". It might be a lot rarer than you think.
The *last* thing i want to give any newcomer into this, if we mean as an investment, is psychological comfort.
They themselves might, over time, find that comfort and I'm all for helping people with education.
But selling it to people, marketing it, convincing them with concepts like guaranteed cycles, or guaranteed anything ... I'm dead set against that.
jeeez, i was just being hyperbolic, being at a simple 10x during a bear market does wonders taking the edge off is all i am saying (being up 10x during the bull does not count).
Well sure but I'm dead serious. I think proselytising bitcoin is bad, not just "it doesn't end up helping that much", but it's actually bad, or at least counterproductive
Yes. Cycles, bull markets, these concepts have no meaning unless they're implying a determinism, in which case they are horribly wrong.
I think the “cycle” people are talking about in your references is the reactive (presumed deterministic) nature of market price from the halving being every four years and then leaving humans to do human things on the heals of that math event. Until it breaks it actually looks cyclical. Climb, blow off, retrace, consolidate, on repeat. Can’t fault them. But it’s tricky to take it to the bank as proof of future performance.
My fav chart that BitboCharts slapped up…
“Back in my day, we would ride the bear both ways, in the snow, to set up our cold storage on a pre-2008 ThinkPad.”
😄 ... back in my day we didn't have "cold storage" we encrypted our wallet.dat then promptly lost our yubikey dongle .. and we were grateful for it!
(With apologies to Stefan Thomas)
epoch