Is it though? Bitcoin corrected from $5k to $3k in September. During that same correction Litecoin corrected from $100 down to $27. This just seems like the 50% correction that's been overdue for awhile.

Yes, it is, it's when a correction becomes a crash. At least in stock trading the sentiment differs greatly between the two. Most people trading BTC don't have a clue about trading though, though the market will be a lot less predictable.

My point was that this sort of massive correction is pretty common and even predictable. After watching the gdax charts for months it seems like one law of crypto is "every price gets reached at least twice". The price of BTC blew past $10k and up to $20k very swiftly. The whales need it to do a full retrace so they can buy back in cheaply and hose the retail buyers.

No none has a clue about trading...stocks or crypto.

What's driving it is for whatever reason the price declined a bit, so people who were just in to speculate got worried and sold, but they had to sell to someone who was willing to buy, driving the price down, causing more people to sell, etc. Pretty classic behavior in this sort of situation.

early on bitcoin was, for a long time, regularly crashing to ~50% then rising to ~200%

2 - 10 - 5 - 20 - 10 - 40 - 25 - 100 - 50

when it crashed to 50 from 100 in 2013? 2012? i really wanted to buy 10 of them as i had observed the pattern for a long time. wish i had. oh well.

so clearly now it's going to rise to ~40k (kidding)

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I recall a point in time where it first rallied up to about $33 then crashed down to something like $2.

Why wouldn't it? If it is truly being used by financial institutions to transfer wealth then those are big pressures for an upward slope.

transfer wealth - what a joke.

You will transfer a hell of a lot less wealth today than last week - what a great method of transferring wealth!

But there have been 50% crashes before, right? (legit curiousity here).

Yes, memorably when the Mt. Gox exchange collapsed & others before that when there was very little volume.

The difference here is that it doesn't appear to be driven by any big event such as a major exchange collapsing. Possibly the Bitconnect crash is to blame, but who knows.

For me, it feels like Bitcoin has reached peak awareness so it's going to be more and more difficult to bring new people in, especially as a lot of people get burned on this crash.

It makes me kind of sad that /r/Bitcoin is all religious HODLers posting pictures of lamborghinis. Would be nice if there was actual interest in or use of the technology.

Chinese new year?

Fundamentals?

I don't mean this in a flippant way, but I don't think there are fundamentals that support BTC at any objective price, since so much of the value is in speculation, both good (excited about the future utility) and bad (got 2 git dose mad gainz).

Unless you were being cheeky and saying its going to zero, in which case... I think its probably worth more than zero.

Fundamentals of a market really controlled by a few, which would be different than a large correction in the stock market over 2 days.