https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-hits-20-000-for-the-first-time-in-history

From the cointelegraph.com article:

The price of Bitcoin (BTC$20,743) has reached $20,000 for the first time in history on Dec. 16. The historic milestone comes just over two weeks after breaking its previous all-time high.

 

In December of 2020 Anno Domini, Bitcoin surpassed the official $20k mark for the first time.  Almost three years earlier, though, everyone had already begun saying "Bitcoin just hit twenty thousand..." because it had risen into the upper $19k's and even topped $20k on some exchanges back in the end of 2017.  That first time it rose is the Fall/Winter that a new friend of mine had given me a half of a Litecoin (LTC) when I expressed interest in cryptocurrency.  He said something about, "I'm up so far right now that a half a Litecoin seems like a lot to you, but when I bought it, it was only a few dollars."  When he gave to me half of one, 1 LTC was worth somewhere around $50, so it was worth about $25.  He told me to go make a Litecoin wallet and he'd send me some, so that's what I did, and he told me to just have it.

I turned that $25 worth of LTC into several smaller coins, like XRP when it was about $0.25, and some other, smaller coins, and I went slowly, and I read about and absorbed what all the fees meant, so that I would have at least a close idea to how much each transaction would cost, and I got some BTC for a little while, but the fees for using it back then, before the Lightning network and all that have come since then, were too much to make it useful at all unless you were out buying Lambos and Helos with it, then it was convenient because the mindset back then was, "nobody knows what we're doing with this, so we can do whatever we want .. it's close enough to anonymous..." but XMR and other "privacy" coins already existed, because systems like blockchain explorers and whatnot were just being invented.

I kept about half of that half of a Litecoin, so I had about .25 LTC for a while, until I got into actual day trading, once I started funding my own crypto wallets.  With the momentum that there was in the leadup to 2018 and the eventual collapse in value, it seemed like for a little while that it would always be rising, like there was no ceiling, no end in sight, and nobody could guess any better than anyone else where it would end.  Even if someone were to have said back then, "It's going to go to about $20k and stop and come back down," nobody would have really remembered, because there were so many predictions back then, they all kind of got drowned out in the noise of each other.

Since Bitcoin had been released into the world, I had heard about it and wondered about it, but it seemed like something that was too difficult to get into for a long while.  Then, a friend explained to me the idea of the blockchain, and how it resets its riddle every ten minutes, and then re-calculates every so often to adjust its difficulty level to try and make the next one be as close to a ten-minute problem for all the computing power hooked up to it in that present range of time to solve... and he gave me that first bit of cryptocurrency for free, and then I even started mining some XRP with a laptop I had, just to kind of get a benchmark for how long it might take to mint some crypto of my own, and before long, I was into it a lot, thinking and talking about it and telling anyone who would listen that it's going to be something even more valuable one day.

Somehow, there was plenty of time for me to sit and read about the new coins coming out all the time, and I learned about all the different architectures of each of the different kinds of cryptocurrencies, and I was able to study the active charts on the few exchanges that I traded on back then, and I was able to observe over time the influence of more and more automated trading influencing the markets, so that at various times during the day, it was obvious that there were certain market movements that were caused by the overall cumulative predictive programming of the bots that are programmed around the world to predict what the markets are going to do.

Without really understanding why or how I was understanding a lot of it, I began to understand a lot of it, and I understood how to make decisions which have profited me whether the markets are going up "in a bull market," or going down "in a bear market," because there are patterns to look for, which can be predicted.

In some lightning storms outside in the dark of the night, it is possible to watch and observe and then to predict when the next lightning bolts and thunder will be.  In some lightning storms, it is not.  Similarly, in some periods of the always-rambunctious cryptocurrency markets, there are certain segments during the trading cycles wherein patterns emerge which can be recognized early on by an astute observer, and which can be utilized to gauge whether it would be profitable to engage and disengage with these patterns, to buy and sell crypto during their influence.

Most patterns have one or two good initial bumps of volatility, and then the following patterns repeat a similar timing several more times, in a decreasing level of volume and change in value.  Especially in a "bear" market.

You can tell when a "bear" market is turning into a "bull" market because for a long while, people will have noticed these kinds of diminishing patterns over an overall downward trend, but then over the course of a few days and weeks, it will become noticeable that there is a disruption to these diminishing patterns.  Whereas before, there might be one or two good bumps of volatility, and then when the markets make the turn upwards into a long-range shift in value, those diminishing levels of volatility will sporadically grow and cause bigger spikes more and more often.  Eventually these volatilities turn to a mostly-positive trend, for longer and longer periods of time.

Once there has been a longer period where the markets have been increasing in value (as they are all tied intrinsically (for the time being) to Bitcoin), there will be astonishing losses of value that seem to happen in mid-stride, and lots of people will lose the value of their holdings, and they will begin to fear and panic, and fall victim to "FUD," which is "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt," and they will sell after watching the value of their capital fall, fall, fall away.  Then, when they see it has turned back up, that "FUD" prevents the losers from buying at a reasonable time, and when they eventually again watch the value float back up into the cosmos, they buy back in when its value is very high, having fallen victim to "FOMO," or, "Fear Of Missing Out," which is a twin pair to "FUD."

There need to be a lot of losers for there to be some winners in this space.

There is a simple principle to follow, to guarantee that you will *not* be a victim of "FUD" or "FOMO" ever: buy low, and sell high.  That's it.  It sounds over-simplistic, and it is, but in general, this is the principle.  You buy when the value is low, and you sell when it is higher, at least high enough to gain some profit after covering the cost of the fees for the transaction. 

This is, of course, general advice for turning a profit, and up to now, it's good for anybody who invests, but it should be noted here that the majority of what I'm discussing regarding strategies and tactics in crypto trading is based on a day-trading mentality, meaning buying and selling the same coin perhaps multiple times in a day.

When trading only just enough to make a little bit of a profit, when learning the ropes of how it all works, it is best to strictly follow this principle of "buy low and sell high."  This principle does expand beyond just the current day's trading, though, so that you might purchase x amount of a coin at, say, $10 today, but if it is a down-turning market and every coin is losing value, then overall, no matter what you would normally sell it at, that would be a loss, but if you sell it with the intention of eventually buying back in at a better cost later, to then sell at an overall better/highest price even later, then you're expanding the "buy low and sell high" principle across days and weeks and months of market time, depending on when you're able to turn everything back into a profit range.

That's where I'm currently at.  I have been putting more and more money in, as the markets are going lower and lower, so I'm watching my wallet values drop.  But, I'm also raising my wallet values by selling and buying during the smaller-yet-profitable ups and downs in the markets.  So, if the rest of the markets have gone down 50%, and I bought in $10 worth of crypto, instead of mine being worth only $5, it's worth more like $8 or so.  Then, later on, when it all goes back up, above $80k, above $200k, higher??, I will have even more capital worth more than if I had just let it sit there in a wallet this whole time.  To me, this is fun.

For some people, they're going to be happy as plum pie in a little while, having never done anything with their initial investment into Bitcoin some time in the past, because they're going to check their wallet value and it's going to surpass that "special number" they have set in their own head, and they're going to withdraw their cash at some multiplied value from what they initially put in years ago.  These non-day-trader types of people are taking what is traditionally known as a "least risky" approach to the markets.  I don't usually use any "less risky" terms when discussing cryptocurrency, because it's all going to crash one day, and all of it will be a loss, so I don't like to agree with that kind of talk, but, in general, for someone to just buy in one day and be able to put it mostly out of their mind for a while until they're ready to withdraw it later one one day, that's alright, and as long as they time it right, their withdraw will be grand.

For me, I want to multiply as much of it as much as I can, while it is small beans, so that when it grows big, it will be lots more big beans than what otherwise it would have been.  This being said, I day trade, though I have also put some aside for savings, as a long-term investment.  It's not an either-or kind of thing, but it's worth thinking through, to know what your approach is with each iota of every thing you have, including fractions of cryptocurrency.

We're looking at the $20,000 range right now for Bitcoin, and a lot of people have a sentiment of, "is it dead?" because it seems like it's an abyss that is draining all the value out of itself.  I see it more like a tsunami wave, which the further out it draws the ocean waters, the bigger the wave return will be when that underwater earthquake shocks the coastlands with its shockwave and tumultuous momentum up the slopes.  Soon there are going to be some cracks in fault lines out in the ecospheres which influence the world economies, and cryptocurrencies are going to seem like "just the way to go," but again, I warn you: this system is going to crash.  In a moment, an hour, the world will reel from all the technology it relies on crashing.  Don't put anything into this system that you cannot afford to lose.

Put everything into it today that you can afford to risk losing, if you also want to afford the risk of multiplying it over the course of the next few weeks and months and years.  There will likely be a few seismic shifts up and down before it really strikes an upward vertical ascent to the Moon, so beware, so that you can adjust as needed and be ready for a sudden loss in value, but if you are prepared, then prepare for a soon, immediate exit from this "trough" that has lasted in this $19k-$22k range for the past weeks and months.

My guess is that it goes up towards the $60k mark, hangs out for $20k up or down for a while, then goes up somewhere not quite $200k, then eventually settles up to the $200k mark for a while, before either staying their or adjusting back down to a smaller number, bigger than $50k.  There is the potential to see spikes of over $1m during this next upwards Moonshot, but I don't expect it to happen more than a handful of times, and it certainly won't stay above the $1m mark for very long.  Not this time around, but maybe after another year and some months, in the next next Moonshot, it could climb up that high and higher.

Based on what I believe, though, this Earth probably won't be around much longer, and at some point soon all of the cryptocurrencies are going to become inaccessible.  I cannot stress this too much.  It would be sad if anybody thought I somehow did not warn them about this, or that I did not believe what I'm telling them, simply because I also trade in cryptos.  I am openly saying that if it all crashed right now, I would lose a lot of money.  But, I have also explained in part about my approach, and how what I put in, I work to double it, and then I take out that initial money, so that I get it back.  Anything that happens after that is happening in the realm of total profit, so after a certain point, I'm multiplying profit within profit, and there is no possibility of suffering any loss of funds that I've worked for outside of cryptocurrency, because I've already received back what I initially put in.

Perhaps I will write more in-depth on my strategies and tactics later, but I need to think more about how to phrase it so that I don't come across sounding like I'm giving some sort of solid advice to a sure profit.  I'm simply telling you about the certain principles which I've found work for me, but if you don't have patience or discernment or the time to sit and watch and study the charts, then anything I say to you could end up hurting you if you think that by following it, you'll somehow make a mint.  If you have read this far, I am assuming that you have at least some intelligence to think for yourself, or you wouldn't have kept reading past the first few paragraphs.  You absolutely must be able to think for yourself if you want to turn any real profit in cryptocurrency.  Following the advice of others is not going to make you rich.  It can only help guide you to form your own understanding of the truth of it all.  You must rely on the truth.