Original message deleted midway due to autorefresh, sigh....
making a short version again (update , turned out even longer, sorry....)
ETH lost nearly 50% from cycle high not even reaching its last cycle ath, second deepest liquidity after bitcoin yet support was cut through like warm butter.
Worst existential crisis for ETH since the 2016 DAO hack. L1 usage/revenues collapsed, L2s are parasitic. VC sharks with competing L1 bags smelling blood and attacking it. Bullish structure broken, fundamentals under big question
Who ate ETH's lunch? Solana above all, by nearly every metric imaginable, sans TVL, where it is anyway catching up.
Yet
SOL has now lost nearly 50% from cycle high, which let's be honest was only above last cycle's ATH by a few percent a few times for a few minutes/hours, and daily candle never once closing above the old ATH -- that with literally the biggest ever historical event for crypto (launch of a memecoin by a celebrity billionaire US president aka the crypto president trump) in the backdrop and all the valhalla promises of ETFs, institutions, nation states, most pro-crypto us government ever (and probably the first crypto-friendly one).
With SOL you have obviously, poor decentralization (allegedly improved somewhat?), extractive parasitical scams facilitated by pumpfun, memecoins, and celebrity rugpulls (including the above trump coin) which are purely extractive, not reinvesting in ecosystem, and if scammers in old cycles used to hold majors they scammed from the public (bitcoin fork scammers held their BTC, ethereum ICO scammers held their ETH), solana scammers don't even hold their SOL, they dump it for USDC. (pumpfun founder, all these presidential ruggers, celebrities, since they never cared about crypto in the first place, just wanted it to extract money from fools). Also, solana beat ethereum by being better sharks with a sleek, fast and cheap L1. It can thus be itself devoured by some new shinier blockchain, SUI and Sonic are already eating solana's own lunch aggressively. What next? Will their ecosystem stakeholders be as loyal as ethereum ones in times of crisis? (ftx crash was the closest equivalent to the dao hack of ethereum for solana, since then many had a solid opportunity to exit)
then we have Bitcoin in the backdrop which is looking weak. MUCH BETTER than altcoins, sure, but still weak structure overall. Even last cycle it topped out way below everyone's expectations or S2F model predictions, which they keep adjusting since the actual price action doesn't fit their rainbow world anymore (and its main proponent btw literally posting he capitulated into converting his BTC to a bitcoin ETF lol wtf). Moving averages (e.g. MA99) have caught up with the current BTC prices, but instead of pumping, it bleeds out slowly, thus going below those MAs....
And then of course we have macro:
SPX/Nasdaq are at new ATHs, disconnecting further from both the fundamentals of the underlying companies and the state of US/global real economy. Every month, more indicators light up, comparing today to 1929, 1999 or 2007 (and surpassing in many cases). Then we have the US interest rates that are high and little prospect of going lower, Japanese interest rates going up and of course the political wildcard that is Trump, whose every word or threat of tariffs or radical action gives markets jitters. Not commenting on whether he is right or wrong, DC is probably supremely corrupt, but it is also probably so intertwined with many major US corporations that uncovering and publicising all that fraud and kickbacks will take down all those corporations and the stockmarket.
Again, from the Fight Club perspective let it all burn is cool, but i personally care more about what happens to my magic internet money.
Nothing has even happened yet (from the SPX/Nasdaq) perspective, but alts are already obliterated.
what happens to alts, if Bitcoin dives to low 90s or even low 80s, which it can easily do without even breaking the bullish macrostructure?
and what happens to both bitcoin and alts if SPX/Nasdaq starts correcting or, even worse, crashing?
I am curious about your take on what is happening.
What is your outlook, and what are your plans?
Cryptotwitter are all jeets, shills and clowns, zero perspective from any commentators or analysts there, feels like this cycle even those who used to be smart/sharp either got liquidated, got corrupted, became scammers or at best are genuinely clueless honestly trying to discuss the confusing picture they see, without becoming engagement farmers (very few of those, and they time and again are wrong, and even fewer of them have the guts to admit and own it).
The obvious, "you should have only bought Bitcoin" that everyone seems to be parroting is not helpful. Had I never touched alts, I would not have made it just by DCAing into BTC only. I still own BTC, which to be fair I always had the hardest time understanding. My life will thankfully therefore not change if alts go to zero, and BTC remains at current price levels.
My question if first and foremost about SOL, ETH. Maybe quality established majors, though at this stage I struggle to suggest which ones...
I got used to holding 95% drawdowns in crypto over the cycles, and typically the right coins rewarded diamond hands (not memecoins!), but now i wonder if conviction has become delusion.
And even those of you who are Bitcoin maxis, tell me this: altcoins mostly go to 0, because they depend a lot more on their devs / management, who by default will be self-interested and greedy and thus will corrupt their protocols and design/change tokenomics only to extract pure profit to insiders.
Bitcoin, being more pure and convervative, seems to have held its values better (again, many Bitcoin OGs would strongly disagree with it, and bitcoin civil wars demonstrated that ultimately, groups of people can exert control/hijack bitcoin, which was supposed to be a peer to peer digital cash solution). So it seems even with bitcoin it could be argued it has been corrupted, but as long as price only goes up, i guess all sins can be forgiven.
What if it stops going up? What if it gets properly hijacked by US gov't / wall street? Can huge single sellers (e.g. microstrategy) force a massive cascade down? Who will then buy? Can concentrated miners be forced to fork to new tokenomics? Why does blackrock have a disclaimer that 21 million bitcoin maximum threshold is not guaranteed? Why can't the same groups who suppressed gold and silver prices for years and decades, suppress bitcoin in the same way for years and decades? You can argue all you want that something is undervalued, but what matters is what price the market will give you for this asset when you need to sell it? There is a difference between waiting out a 1-2 year long bear cycle (which still requires financial planning) and waiting out for many years. What if you urgently need money for a new house when the old one is destroyed, what if your loved one needs urgent expensive medical care?
I absolutely treasure the censorship resistance Bitcoin has gifted us (and Ethereum had adhered to) and the fact that I don't have to appease the disgusting leeches that are bankers. At the same time, I am worried whether this time, they can hijack and destroy value of my beloved crypto.
On top of that we have some mild form of a dystopian world with decaying democracies, assertive autocracies, poor and/or arbitrary rule of law, total financial control, populism, extremism, nationalism and a good set of ingredients for a world war 3, with nowhere to run...
Will bitcoin preserve its store of value function, given what you observe on the fundamentals, price action, onchain, etc?
Sorry for the long message but wanted to be nuanced and looking for thoughful takes...
