Bitcoin Briefly Breaks $10,000 Mark…the Wrong Way

For a few months there, it almost seemed like bitcoin would never go anywhere but up. It got to the point where people were taking out mortgages just to get their hands on some of that sweet, sweet cryptocurrency. Then, the reversals started. And kept going. And then got nasty. Now, bitcoin has seen a price point it hasn’t seen since…um..November 2017? More specifically, it broke the psychologically-crucial $10,000 barrier, and it’s been hovering around that point for the last couple days as of this writing.

The word is that bitcoin, along with most every other cryptocurrency out there, is suffering from a bit of general weakness. Even the major crypto issues like EOS and Cardano have been on a bit of a decline of late, and the XEM token from NEM was especially roughly treated after the Coincheck hack that resulted in the single biggest theft in history, by some reports. Word from no less than Reuters is that some of the XEM tokens taken in that effort are actually being sold right now, which raises at least a few ethical hackles and makes XEM a potentially risky buy ethically, if not legally.

There are two market doctrines at work here: there’s the HODL theory, that misspelled “hold” that became its own acronym: Hold On for Dear Life. This says that people are going to hold onto their bitcoin, dogecoin, whatever until they’re either valuable enough to sell for whatever price they hope to get or until the currency is no longer accepted for cash at all. The other is the “weak hands” theory, in which there are certain price drops that occur in an asset’s lifetime that force out those who don’t have much faith in the investment, the so-called “weak hands”, as opposed to the “strong hands” that are able to wait for an asset’s true value to emerge and ride that asset to profitability and beyond.

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the cryptocurrency market, or perhaps, just the end of the beginning. With predictions for the ultimate value of bitcoin ranging from Peter Schiff’s “ultimately worthless” to James Altucher’s $1 million, there’s a whole lot of in-the-middle to consider, and consider it a lot of people likely are.