 Bitcoin has seen a pretty big fall this week, along with the entire crypto markets. However, some people like Tom Lee saw the pretty bullish outlook for the cryptocurrency, even though Lee slashed his 25k price point for Bitcoin's end of the year price early this week. He's then maintained a 15k price point even amidst the current market crash. Even though experts from Bloomberg also say that Bitcoin could go as low as 1,500, they still kind of think that's a good thing, saying that that's what makes the coin less boring, whatever that means. Anyway, we've talked to some experts about this, including Alex Tapscott, Anthony Pompiano, and Tony Vase, to find out what's going on with this market crash. There is no cause. There is never a single cause that causes any crash. There is never a single cause that causes a big run up. The Bitcoin was overpriced. It's been overpriced all year. Bitcoin does that. Bitcoin constantly drops 80% or 90% to make sure people know what they're doing, that they understand why they're in Bitcoin. And I think there were so many big buyers of Bitcoin and they weren't buying it for the right reasons. They were buying it to make a quick buck and to be famous and to make money for their investors. And I think a lot of these people need to exit the market completely. There's a lot of what I call the conspiracy theories are out. Is it folks are just selling because of end of year stuff? Is it because of the Bitcoin cash fork? Is it because, I saw a report today that said people who bought in early 2017 are starting to sell now because they're near their cost basis. I think it could be a combination of all that. But I don't know if it actually really matters. I tell people that the individual reasoning is much less important than the longer term trend. We've been in a bear market for a while. I think we're going to continue to stay in that bear market until we kind of bottom out. Well, I don't think there's any one particular cause to the market crash. You know, if you look at what's happened over the past year or so, the market has been a declining since an all time high in January. And I think that the high that we reached was an artificial one. It was based on a lot of hot money entering the sector and pushing valuations up to a level that were totally unsustainable. So I think most of the correction that we've seen so far has been very healthy. I think what's happened in the past a couple of days or a couple of weeks has basically been a flight to liquidity. So effectively we're in a period of time where there are a lot of investors who own lots of different kinds of alternative coins, you know, or things other than Bitcoin basically. And as the market continues to correct, they're looking to liquid liquidate into something that has more fungibility, more liquidity. And then what's compounding that I think is that over the past, I should say about a year ago, a bunch of people went out and raised a lot of money for funds, which are nearing the one year maturity date when typically investors are able to redeem. And so wouldn't be surprising if I saw a lot of those different kinds of investors redeeming now. And that's exacerbating that liquidity crunch. And then compounding that there are a lot of projects who've raised money over the past year who are looking at their treasury basically evaporating because they still hold a disproportionate amount in ether and Bitcoin and they're essentially trying to liquidate the fiat as quickly as possible. So it's sort of a perfect storm of a number of things. One was your evaluations were too high. Number two is we're in the midst of a prolonged bear market. And then adding on to that, you've got this rush to liquidate, which I think is causing people to take bids at any level effectively and driving the prices down even more. Psychological argument is just there's not enough pain yet. People are still, you know, if you look on Twitter saying, Oh, it's coming back, it's coming back, right? There's this belief that, you know, it's going to be okay. And I think that we that means we haven't reached true capitulation yet. When we reach that, that's kind of the psychological bottom, if you will. When you look at the technicals, there's supports that seem to be somewhere in that, you know, 4,000 to 2,800. There's there's multiple supports in there. And so I think that we've kind of punched through the rest. And so maybe it stops at 4,000, maybe it's 3,500, you know, 3,000, but it's definitely farther below where we are today. And I think the other thing is the historicals, right? So, you know, historical analysis does not necessarily mean that's what's going to happen in the future, but it is a good way to get perspective, right? And so if you look at kind of the first two market cycles, there was over 80% drawdowns. So at 75% today, which is close, but if we went to $3,000 and put it right about 85% right off that haul time high. And so I think that's really kind of the triangulation of multiple arguments around psychology, technicals, historicals, etc. That get us into that sub $4,000 price point as a general target. I'm doing my best to navigate my followers so that we can properly time the bottom. But at the moment, I don't see it in sight. At the moment, it looks to me like we can fall significantly lower and we can and it can last significantly longer. I hope it can change because in this in the last few weeks, people finally started to understand what a bear market can do. But I think people are still in a very happy place with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin ecosystem has this amazing ability to put everybody in a very sad place. And only when that happens will the price finally bottom and then start to go to new all time highs. There's a high probability that Bitcoin will continue to go down in value. We could see sub $4,000 somewhere in the like $3,500, $3,000 range. And then from the timing perspective, you know, we think it goes into 2019 could go as long as till Q3 of 2019. And so if that happens, you know, we're talking about another nine or 10 months possibly of this bear market until there's, you know, true blood industry capitulation and people basically give up and leave the industry. I don't think we hit the bottom. It's really hard to say Bitcoin can reach, you know, $1,000 if it falls quickly or we can stay here in the $3,000 to $4,000 range into the summer and that would be enough. It's not about a specific price. It's not about a specific time. It's about people's mentality. When enough people exit the system because of bad decisions and there's nobody left to exit, Bitcoin will finally bottom. This may happen at a very low price of Bitcoin. This may also happen at a distant point in time. We're 10 months into, you know, a bear market now in normal financial markets, typically bear markets don't last this long, but in crypto, the only precedent we have is the periods that we saw in the past and in the past, we've seen periods where prices have corrected very quickly and rebounded, but we've also seen periods where things have continued to decline for long periods of time. I'm looking at the market today and, you know, trying to gauge not just the financial drivers, but also the emotional drivers of this market. And I think that there are a lot of people who remained hopeful until relatively recently and now they're very fearful and what happens after fear typically is capitulation and after capitulation, people basically just give up. So I'm not sure if we reach that capitulation point yet. I wouldn't be surprised the prices rebounded here. You always get a dead cat bounce after there's a period of, you know, prolonged downturns, but we could retest the flow and we could go even lower. All of the speculators and the tourists have sold, they've left and what you get is you're left with this base of holders who are saying, you know, I'm a long-term believer, I'm not going anywhere and there's really that true seller fatigue and it feels like that's probably lower than where we are today. I think that the government crackdown on cash can help Bitcoin go a long way as the government starts to eliminate cash, more physical cash, more and more people will be will be looking at Bitcoin. If the global economy starts to go down really badly, the governments might go after people for taxes and people might be looking at Bitcoin as a bit of a safe haven. We need to have people feel that there's value in these assets and be willing to buy them not because of momentum or because of FOMO, but because they're actually valuing it on what the fundamental utility could be long term. So to me, I'm looking at a lot of projects that raised money over the past year, which have yet to even launch but are coming out in the next little while. So projects like Cosmos and Polkadot, for example. And I'm also looking at some of the emerging networks, the ones that follow the theory and that are now live things like EOS and Aeon, Icon, Tezos and others to start showing organic growth in terms of new application development and also reaching milestones in terms of technical maturity. So the things that I look for are not really catalysts, they're not momentum or sentiment. They're actually fundamentals. I want to see that this technology is being used and people are actually getting value out of it and that the promise that a lot of people made is beginning to get fulfilled. In the end, ultimately, the thing about technology is that people generally tend to vastly overestimate its potential in the short term and then vastly underestimate its potential in the long term. Anybody who's hanging their hopes on a reversal in the market because of things like a Bitcoin ETF or so-called institutional buying or the adoption of Bitcoin futures through backed, I think all of those catalysts that people are looking at will be positive, but don't hang your hat on them. If you're only hoping that one single news event is going to change the direction of a marketplace, I think you're going to be mistaken. I think that there's a lot more than needs to happen for this market to turn around. But yeah, of course, I view those things as being very positive. One thing I will note though on this whole institutional investor side, institutional investors have been in this industry for years. When people talk about the upcoming institutional investors, they may be talking about more traditional vanilla style investors, mutual funds and sovereign mull funds, but there are hedge funds and family offices and venture capital investors and high net worth individuals, people who you traditionally consider to be institutions that have been in this market for years. And I know that firsthand and I know a lot of people who work in this industry know that as well. So I don't think that there's any big wave of institutional investors that's going to move the needle anytime soon. But I do think that at these valuations, there are going to be a lot of people looking to reload and are going to look to invest a lot of money with prices where they are. Sometimes no action is the best action. A lot of times what helps is creating a time-based or periodic buying or selling schedule and then just staying super disciplined to that, right? And saying, look, I've got long-term belief in either direction of an asset and I'm going to stay disciplined and that usually ends up being, you know, working out pretty well for people. So my advice right now is if you were thinking of quitting your job and going into the Bitcoin ecosystem, don't do it right now. Wait another year. Try to accumulate more fiat capital. And if you see Bitcoin drop below that $3,000 range, start accumulating that Bitcoin. This is not the time to panic sell. Don't ever panic sell. And you're better off like waiting and selling at 5,000 or 6,000 at a little bit higher price. And if we did bottom, I don't believe that we did. But if we did bottom at 4,000 this morning and we start to go up to new all-time highs, that's okay. You can buy it back above 10,000. The important part is to buy it between buying at 10,000 and you hold it into 50,000, 100,000. Well, I've never really understood the concept of huddling. I understand the concept of holding something long-term because you think that it's underpriced and you think the value is going to go up. But if you are looking at investment today and you think on its merits, you know, there's a chance that it could go down. It could go down for a while. Then I don't see why you wouldn't try and mitigate your losses and then reenter at a lower price. And also there are, you know, practical tax reasons why you may want to sell, especially if you're going into year-end to capture a capital loss. So the question of the concept of huddling, I agree with the idea of owning something long-term because you believe in it. But I think that holding just for the sake of holding without consideration for other facts or other factors is not necessarily the best investment strategy. So if you look at the mining perspective, we've got people that we've been talking with that are mining anywhere between $4,500 to $6,000. Most of those people are shutting off, but there's a very large portion of people who are mining at sub $3,500 price points. They usually are getting either free low cost or like two cents a kilowatt hour power. And this is all the traditional areas, China, et cetera. And so we don't think they're going anywhere. We think there's a long way for the price to go before they get in jeopardy of mining at a loss. And so those are the people who are really worth paying attention to because that's the bulk of the miners. They're doing it commercially. And those are the ones that it would be really scary if they started to shut off the machines. If you run a very efficient, very well-researched mining operation, then you're probably doing okay. I'm pretty sure there are miners where their cost of production is between $2,000 and $3,000 per Bitcoin. And if your mining operation was not properly designed, then your mining operation is going to shut down. It's going to separate those that know what they're doing when it comes to mining and those that don't.