AN INTRODUCTORY GUIDE

Behind the Bulls and Bears of Bitcoin

Introducing the concepts and to begin understanding the ups and downs of Bitcoin prices

Preface

There have been money-related phenomenon in the past and there have been tech phenomenon — from the rise of financial derivatives to the iPod, these two industries are not shy of revolutionary ideas.

Bitcoin is more than a combination of the two — it’s a grassroots, by-the-user for-the-user means and ends to lift the institutional and regulatory requirements on wealth management, transfer of value, earning, and money in general. Now, we no longer have to subject ourselves to the tyranny of banks and governments in order to interact economically.

Now — the power is in ‘hodling’ your own private keys, and the success or failure of your money and wealth as well as the security rests entirely on you — cutting middlemen from the equation. In the case of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, the middlemen are the billionaire banksters, real estate moguls and bureaucrats — whereas Blockchain as a whole removes middlemen of all other sorts of descriptions.

Bulls

Satoshi Nakamoto, long-since disappeared creator of Bitcoin, had a few ideas in mind with his new and novel tech. Among them, he wanted to free people caught in debt cycles — where you need a mortgage for a house, or a loan for a car. To own property in our modern capitalism you need to sign over years worth of your labor — at compounding interest. That’s not right, is it?

With Bitcoin, and the tools and platforms that are being created in this fledging ecosystem, it’s now possible to acquire, speculate and realize gains on wealth that you would have otherwise been unable to achieve — which has given rise to many thousands, tens thousands ‘new’ ‘crypto millionaires.’

While Bitcoin has gone up in price exponentially over the last decare, it might seem to some as though the Gold Rush has come and gone. It might seem like the potential upside of investing in crypto has long-since dwindled down to next-to-nothing, but they’re wrong — so long as there are huge discrepancies in different locations and highly volatile prices, there are recurring opportunities to earn a % of a % on a trade on crypto exchanges — many, many times more than the opportunities that exist in traditional markets. With the right amount of research one can identify free and open source solutions for single-exchange triangle crypto arbitrage, inter-exchange crypto arbitrage, or other trading solutions.

What might be an even greater opportunity, though, is simply buying and holding crypto — with many voices chiming in there’s a good chance at a $50 000 Bitcoin by End of Year 2020, it might be a good time to see what extra financial flex you might have — and invest only what you can afford to lose, of course.

Bears

Efforts to slander and libel this movement lead the bearish (or downwards movement on exchange) sentiments. These include otherwise good-hearted efforts to propel the technology and community forward, but in doing so the efforts seek to re-centralize things better left decentralized. Things like Binance — while good-natured — aim to hold control over your keys and your funds and act as middlemen to you and your crypto, introducing a single point of failure that could be catastrophic in the worst case.

Take Mt. Gox, who stole millions from their users when they exited the crypto scene — same with QuadrigaCX here in Canada, and countless other centralized outfits that had an opportunity to ‘dine and dash.’

How about a bad reputation? Bitcoin had it’s rise to commonplace as it was used as an anonymous online currency on the dark web, which tarnished the name of cryptocurrencies for years until the greater community agreed as a whole that Bitcoin and crypto had redeeming qualities — and the value grew exponentially. Meanwhile, opportunistic people and organizations created Initial Coin Offerings around their platforms and a good number of those exit scammed out already — like the above-mentioned exchanges.

These kinds of events lead to the depreciation of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, while the buying pressure comes back when the value of the asset is perceived to be a ‘good deal.’

Conclusion

With the rise of Decentralized Finance, we’ll see another good push for the bulls — or buyers — of Bitcoin and other crypto, specifically Ether where most of that tech is being built.

Meanwhile, detractors of crypto will continue raising their Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt — backed by billions and if not trillions of conventional dollars. Remember, some people or families could buy all of crypto at market rates if they really wanted to.

But, in context and with enough research, people out there will find all sorts of reasons to support Blockchain and crypto — from ‘banking the unbanked,’ a phrase coined by Bitcoin creator Satoshi, to replacing whole financial systems and removing the tight, clenching fists of the ruling class — the everyman benefits from crypto’s success, while the ultra-rich shake in their boots.