For new people: The simplest reason why Bitcoin and some cryptos continue to rise in value - Consensus & Smart Money.

This is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. As always, do your own research.

I want to put things in to perspective for newer people on how this takes place since I got on board in October 2017 and rode out a 3 year bear market until this point. When the crashes started coming, people put the crashes in to perspective. 20k bitcoin to 5.6k bitcoin in under a month? that 75% loss is nothing! We then swiftly bounced back to 14k. After MT Gox shut down we plummeted from 1500 USD to 130 USD apiece! an over 90% drop!

So, why did we go from 20k at the December 2017 top to only 3.1k at the December 2018 bottom? BTW, percentage-wise that wasn't even the most volatile drop in bitcoin's history. Simply put, Consensus and Smart Money. If you bought bitcoin at any time in 2016 your YoY profits are very high now. If you bought bitcoin at any time in 2012, you're in astronomic profit territory.

However - Smart money will never sell their entire stack. Consensus, in my book, means the subconscious majority of new people to the bitcoin space are willing to sell a percentage of their stack, but never the whole stack because of the potential it has to become later. For example, during this cycle I am hoping to time things correctly so that I sell a percentage of my portfolio for a house that will have a 10 year roof over my head while I wait for the rest of my portfolio to appreciate in value and then I can buy another bigger and newer house later on.

And finally, this is my opinion: when bear markets come, that's the time for the new people to get in to crypto. I don't know if we'll see a black swan event similar to what happened in March 2017 2020, but if it does, you better believe I'm gonna buy more on that day.

EDIT: If you haven't seen this already then you need to now, and then figure out a time to get in for yourself - https://digitalik.net/btc/

Oh, and this is an extremely critical part I have left out: Smart money typically enters and exits the market at a time when the idea of them losing all of their crypto holdings puts them slightly above their losses.