Looking at the 6 month chart, a retest of (very roughly) the 350-380 area seems like a nice consolidation to do because the market hasn't solidified that very much yet after the rather one-sided run up to 500.
This could be like the pirate@40 dip in mid-2012, which also came a few months before a halving. One last little shake off in preparation for the big launch. It does seem to suggest a big launch is still a couple months out, but a quick reversion to the mid-400s or higher wouldn't surprise me.
Besides day traders just riding the short-term sentiment, whoever is selling due to Mike's statement both hasn't been paying attention and doesn't understand the dynamics at play; if this is due to Mike (rather than merely an excuse for a needed consolidation), it demonstrates definitively that the blocksize issue has been weighing down the market, which is bullish because of how easily that can be resolved. When the first 1.1MB block is mined, all that gets flipped into rocket fuel.
I've noticed that large contingents on both sides of the debate haven't hesitated to use FUD as leverage to make their points. Relentlessly, for months. That eventually results in a large dark cloud hanging over the market, which is entirely composed of faux pessimism. A big bearish illusion. That's what investing is all about: identifying when others are under a bullish/bearish illusion and selling/buying before everyone figures it out, while prices are still high/low.
Here we have a clear mechanism and reason for why there is widespread accentuation of the negative and ignoral of the positives - like how many different huge optimizations such as thin/weak/subchained blocks are around the corner and how fragile the Theymosian empire and Core itself is right now, with 1/3 of discussion already moved off the subreddit and BCT long since largely a wasteland while XT and now BU have shifted the whole conversation fundamentally and Classic is running it into the endzone.
It's rare to have such a clear signal; it's the kind of obvious clear-cut situation investors dream of finding. A gigantic paper tiger looms, a few people realize and acknowledge there is nothing to fear but the vast majority have no motivation to accentuate that as it weakens the force of their latest volley of blocksize arguments or Theymos/GavinMikeJeff hate. Optimism is boring, pessimism is in. What more signal could you want as an investor that now is the time to buy?
This dip could be the very last great buying op. Think how this will look when the first >1MB block is mined right on schedule and the chart of blocksize shows minimal or no blockage actually existed. It would show all this fretting over fake barriers was unwarranted, Bitcoin does what it wants, and will scale. It suddenly turns into a race to front-run the unwinding of all that downside. Oh and there's the halving.
EDIT: Redditized:
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/413ph6/time_to_back_up_the_truck/
