Where are the bitcoin lovers now?

[jaygreenb]

You lose money on your first cycle but learn how not to f-it up.

You make some decent money of your second cycle and learn self control and ruthlessness.

You make life/wife changing gains in your third cycle.

That's the consensus.

In my opinion this is the last cycle to make it as a retailer before legacy finance and governments get too oppressive.

Some truth to this, a couple caveats though. You have to stay consistent and accumulate in the bear markets, that is what sets up the huge returns in the upcoming bull market. You also have to adjust your strategy and not just go for the lottery ticket low caps and have a non tradeable stock of btc/eth that you take profits into. You may hit a few, but those bad risk habits are going to wipe you out at some point.

 

[BackInTheGame78]

BTC.D keeps climbing and shows no signs of slowing down on the 1M chart.

Last cycle topped out around 73%, currently we are at 54%, up from a cycle low of 37%.

BTC dominance is another metric you can use to gauge how close you are to the cycle top...the closer that number gets to 75%, the closer you'll be to the cycle top and then it's alt season again...which is crazy since almost all alts have already gone 3-5-10+x from their cycle lows.

In general at this point, BTC will out perform most alts, dollar for dollar. Once it peaks and then starts to decline, alta start out performing BTC.

Can use this to maximize returns as BTC generally will provide a more favorable "bang for the buck" now.

 

[BackInTheGame78]

Interesting thoughts is that this could be a conclusion to the 2020 cycle creating a "blow-off" top that never happened...then it would be a quicker explosion and subsequent decline...

Potential valid points to consider. I'm not a believe in this, but at the end of the day it's something you have to keep in the back of your mind as it unfolds.

 

[jaygreenb]

Interesting thoughts is that this could be a conclusion to the 2020 cycle creating a "blow-off" top that never happened...then it would be a quicker explosion and subsequent decline...

Potential valid points to consider. I'm not a believe in this, but at the end of the day it's something you have to keep in the back of your mind as it unfolds.

Bob Loukas has been talking about the possibility of a left translated cycle for a while now, if price doesn't slow down a bit certainly a good possibility. So much money has started to and will continue to flow in, it is really anyones guess what happens to price in the relative short term. Personal strategy is just sit in my positions and let the market dictate future actions. If things go parabolic, I'll start pulling cash out of my alt positions for some quality of life upgrades. If Bitcoin becomes a standard portfolio allocation and we are hitting the bend in the adoption curve, very possible we have a good 5+yrs trending upwards with a lot of volatility both ways

 

[sangheilios]

Bob Loukas has been talking about the possibility of a left translated cycle for a while now, if price doesn't slow down a bit certainly a good possibility. So much money has started to and will continue to flow in, it is really anyones guess what happens to price in the relative short term. Personal strategy is just sit in my positions and let the market dictate future actions. If things go parabolic, I'll start pulling cash out of my alt positions for some quality of life upgrades. If Bitcoin becomes a standard portfolio allocation and we are hitting the bend in the adoption curve, very possible we have a good 5+yrs trending upwards with a lot of volatility both ways

My personal opinion on this, it's a long one.

BTC has rapidly matured and is now past the 1 trillion dollar market cap. With each cycle we are seeing both diminishing returns/gains and diminished downside volatility. Peak of 2021 at 69k we tanked to roughly 16k, previous cycle was 20k to 3kish. We will have to see how this market plays out, but it could peak at say 150k and retrace to 60k during the bear market. Volatility like this would actually not be all that unusual in even the traditional stock market.

However, the huge new variable to consider is the ETF demand. I personally believe that between now and 2030 we will see tradfi getting more and more into BTC. First we have the ETFs, then it could be something where basic 401ks or other retirement funds allocate percentages of portfolios into BTC. Traditional banks may begin to actually buy and hold it or possibly even lend against it. I basically see an asset where it may steadily grow over time with each cycle but become less and less volatile to the downside.

I don't see BTC just going up constantly, it will have corrections and cooling off periods when people get too greedy. However, long-long term it is obvious that this asset has just been steadily increasing since it's inception and I believe it will continue to do so.

 

[jaygreenb]

My personal opinion on this, it's a long one.

BTC has rapidly matured and is now past the 1 trillion dollar market cap. With each cycle we are seeing both diminishing returns/gains and diminished downside volatility. Peak of 2021 at 69k we tanked to roughly 16k, previous cycle was 20k to 3kish. We will have to see how this market plays out, but it could peak at say 150k and retrace to 60k during the bear market. Volatility like this would actually not be all that unusual in even the traditional stock market.

However, the huge new variable to consider is the ETF demand. I personally believe that between now and 2030 we will see tradfi getting more and more into BTC. First we have the ETFs, then it could be something where basic 401ks or other retirement funds allocate percentages of portfolios into BTC. Traditional banks may begin to actually buy and hold it or possibly even lend against it. I basically see an asset where it may steadily grow over time with each cycle but become less and less volatile to the downside.

I don't see BTC just going up constantly, it will have corrections and cooling off periods when people get too greedy. However, long-long term it is obvious that this asset has just been steadily increasing since it's inception and I believe it will continue to do so.

Definitely will be major corrections and bear markets. What I am unsure about is if we get a parabolic movie over the next 3-6months then a prolonged correction or does it follow the standard cycle and play out to end of 2025 or longer. If btc does become a standard allocation, even a 3-5% standard position, that puts it well into 7 figures. Ultimately I have no idea haha Just going to let the market come to me and enjoy the ride. Feel very fortunate to be ahead of the curve on this

 

[oc16]

I have about .01762 shares of BTC and I bought at the average price of $30,000 over the last two years. I am up about $750.00 on it.

Part of me wants to cash in and take my profits but the other part of me feels it's going to skyrocket past 100K by the end of the year.

 

[jaygreenb]

I have about .01762 shares of BTC and I bought at the average price of $30,000 over the last two years. I am up about $750.00 on it.

Part of me wants to cash in and take my profits but the other part of me feels it's going to skyrocket past 100K by the end of the year.

Personal opinion is hold it for the long term, set up an auto DCA even if small and don't touch it for at least 5+yrs

 

[sangheilios]

I have about .01762 shares of BTC and I bought at the average price of $30,000 over the last two years. I am up about $750.00 on it.

Part of me wants to cash in and take my profits but the other part of me feels it's going to skyrocket past 100K by the end of the year.

Bro, no offense but I would never even bother taking profit with such a small investment. You also aren't factoring in having to pay capital gains taxes. If I was in your position and wanted to use crypto as a means to flip for profit, I'd definitely consider going into alts. BTC long term will do incredibly well, @jaygreenb will agree with me that the best way to treat this asset is like that of a savings account that you steadily add to and hold. I've been in crypto since 2018 and have 0 plans of selling any of my actual BTC but will definitely take profits on alts. IF you understand the fundamentals behind BTC and why institutions are interested in it, you will realize that it is a great store of longer term wealth that will protect you from inflation. Sure, there has been a tremendous amount of volatility but with each halving cycle this will slowly diminish. We may eventually get to a point in the not too distant future where a move from the absolute bottom of the bear market to the top of the following bull cycle is maybe a 50% move.

 

[sangheilios]

Some truth to this, a couple caveats though. You have to stay consistent and accumulate in the bear markets, that is what sets up the huge returns in the upcoming bull market. You also have to adjust your strategy and not just go for the lottery ticket low caps and have a non tradeable stock of btc/eth that you take profits into. You may hit a few, but those bad risk habits are going to wipe you out at some point.

Most retail investors literally go all in on lower cap alts with this idea of them making 100x gains. However, they typically buy when the bull run is already underway and are getting into high risk territory that eventually leads to them getting dumped on, forcing them to capitulate at a heavy loss.

 

[BackInTheGame78]

Working on building an arbitrage bot...will update on progress. Not sure why I haven't thought of this before.

Found a few that I am going to use as a basis for improvements. One is a live bot, the other runs simulations that I can use to test prior to going live.

Pretty clear these are both fairly amateurish pieces of code, but it saves reinventing the wheel.

Going to convert native python into Cython which is C++ wrapped in Python functions to monumentally improve speed and performance.

Then need to get rid of hard coded token lists/pairings and dynamically get them from UniSwap's public API to ensure always have the most up to date lists available. Will then filter based on what I need/want in terms of pairings, liquidity, networks etc.

Will look to see if there are similar features on other networks I can leverage to broaden the scope of the bot.

Will report back once these are completed and working properly as to the extent of networks I am able to loop into this dynamically.

 

[Solomon]

So the fed just cut 50 BPS
I'm expecting a lot of volatility it being an election year
I think October of 2024 will be a decent month but who knows
I'm not expecting BTC to go past 80K for this year

 

[jaygreenb]

So the fed just cut 50 BPS
I'm expecting a lot of volatility it being an election year
I think October of 2024 will be a decent month but who knows
I'm not expecting BTC to go past 80K for this year

Love how this thread keeps getting brought back lol Need to re read from the beginning again one of these days. Barring some huge financial meltdown or black swan, I think we start moving again relatively soon over new few months

 

[sangheilios]

@jaygreenb and @Solomon

I also agree with the idea of there being the potential for a lot of volatility over the next few months.

The election is a huge factor, especially since the incumbent is not in the cards. There's a lot of uncertainty and fear around this election, especially with all of these assassination attempts, war in Ukraine heating up, border/migrant issues, etc. Without getting too political, there is going to be a lot of tension between now and inauguration day regardless of who wins.

The FED cut rates, yes, but on the balance sheet they are still in quantitative tightening right now. I believe over the next few FED meetings they will continue to cut rates and at some point will adjust the balance sheet to quantitative easing. This doesn't have an immediate effect, I believe it will take several months before we see this really take hold, I'm talking February-March of 2025. What we are seeing right now with the markets doing well is just a bit of hype off of the rate cut news, this isn't the major move that we are discussing here.

One interesting news piece lately related to crypto is that Trump was at a BTC bar in Manhattan and was the first president to publicly make a BTC transaction. It's clear that BTC is now center stage and here to stay, I honestly can't imagine where things are going to be by the next halving of 2028, let alone what the 2030s will bring.

I look back on some of these old posts on this thread from 2018 and just laugh. The crazy thing is that there are tons of people who bought into BTC years ago and ended up capitulating and more or less moved on and forgot about this market all together, it's way more common than you probably realize. I remember about 6 years ago there was a guy I knew that showed me his robinhood and we were having a discussion about it. Anyway, he had bought .1 BTC at a price around $700 summer of 2018 and sold it all late fall of that year when it had tanked below 5k. That same .1 BTC would be worth a little over $6000 right now and would have hit that in 2021 as well. This is the same story for the majority of retail that enter into this space. Even all those people who bought BTC when it was $100 probably sold a very long time ago and potentially at losses.

 

[jaygreenb]

@jaygreenb and @Solomon

I also agree with the idea of there being the potential for a lot of volatility over the next few months.

The election is a huge factor, especially since the incumbent is not in the cards. There's a lot of uncertainty and fear around this election, especially with all of these assassination attempts, war in Ukraine heating up, border/migrant issues, etc. Without getting too political, there is going to be a lot of tension between now and inauguration day regardless of who wins.

The FED cut rates, yes, but on the balance sheet they are still in quantitative tightening right now. I believe over the next few FED meetings they will continue to cut rates and at some point will adjust the balance sheet to quantitative easing. This doesn't have an immediate effect, I believe it will take several months before we see this really take hold, I'm talking February-March of 2025. What we are seeing right now with the markets doing well is just a bit of hype off of the rate cut news, this isn't the major move that we are discussing here.

One interesting news piece lately related to crypto is that Trump was at a BTC bar in Manhattan and was the first president to publicly make a BTC transaction. It's clear that BTC is now center stage and here to stay, I honestly can't imagine where things are going to be by the next halving of 2028, let alone what the 2030s will bring.

I look back on some of these old posts on this thread from 2018 and just laugh. The crazy thing is that there are tons of people who bought into BTC years ago and ended up capitulating and more or less moved on and forgot about this market all together, it's way more common than you probably realize. I remember about 6 years ago there was a guy I knew that showed me his robinhood and we were having a discussion about it. Anyway, he had bought .1 BTC at a price around $700 summer of 2018 and sold it all late fall of that year when it had tanked below 5k. That same .1 BTC would be worth a little over $6000 right now and would have hit that in 2021 as well. This is the same story for the majority of retail that enter into this space. Even all those people who bought BTC when it was $100 probably sold a very long time ago and potentially at losses.

A lot of stories like that, most people are just drawn in by the price action and did not do the work to understand what they actually held. Without that, its hard to have real conviction to not only hold but continue to buy on a 85%+ drawdown. For a time, it was my obsession learning about it and even I second guessed many times

So went and re read a few of the first pages and found a few of both our comments from the bottom of the 2018 bear market hahah Guess that worked out alright huh, well played my friend!

Big crypto investor here. I loaded up heavily on the big ones; bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum and litecoin, all through the summer and fall. Last week started a part time job delivering pizzas and puting the money from tips into my crypto portfolio. I'll be starting a physical therapy program next fall semester and will have a solid career lined up that is guaranteed and can just let this stuff sit for the long term. Goal now is to accumulate as much as possible whilst the prices are low.

I am not a developer so I will not attempt to explain how it technically gets there. I do know there has been a lot of progress with the lightning network and additional payment layers can be added to address a lot of those issues in the future. It does not need to be a global currency that transacts as quickly as VISA to make huge gains. The market cap is relatively tiny right now. I do think it has the potential to get there over a long period of time though. Just the fact that it is a decentralized store of value under no governments control and easily transferable without a central bank provides immense value. Everyone knows the rules and unlike typical fiat it can't be printed into oblivion.

I would agree that it's very speculative at this point, all emerging tech is. I do see incredible upside though and have no issues taking a calculated risk on it. There is a lot of attention, money and talent moving into this space and believe with that pressure being applied a lot these problems will get solved. This is a long term play for me and think you need to take larger view of this than the last year and a half. Only time will tell though but we can revisit this in a few years and see how things start to shake out.

People who say it's dead really have no clue what is going on this space. There has been major advancements and infrastructure is being put into place. It's just following normal cycles of an emerging technology.

 

[sangheilios]

A lot of stories like that, most people are just drawn in by the price action and did not do the work to understand what they actually held. Without that, its hard to have real conviction to not only hold but continue to buy on a 85%+ drawdown. For a time, it was my obsession learning about it and even I second guessed many times

So went and re read a few of the first pages and found a few of both our comments from the bottom of the 2018 bear market hahah Guess that worked out alright huh, well played my friend!

Interesting read back on that lol. I definitely made a lot of mistakes with the last cycle for sure. My biggest one was focusing too much on alts, particularly Litecoin and Bcash, when I should have been 70%+ BTC the entire time. It would have prevented me from moving funds around as much as I did and more or less been a fairly stable portfolio. With that said, the time to have heavily loaded up on alts was 2020, which is exactly what I did. The mistake I made with that year though was not buying enough ETH.

This cycle I learned my lesson. I bought BTC up heavily at the bottom of the market 2nd half of 2022, my average price was a hair under 20k. From there, I've been heavily accumulating ADA at the low points in the market; winter of 2022/2023, summer-fall of 2023 and more recently this summer/fall of 2024.

This is a fantastic time to be loading up on alts right now, as they are bottoming at cycle lows with their BTC pairs. ETH right now is trading under .04-BTC. You could throw your money into just about any alt and when we start hitting up when QE takes over you are basically set to make gains. I'd say ETH at best you can maybe 5x your money from here tops, but with the rest of these mid caps it wouldn't be all that difficult to do this and potentially more. Hell, last cycle I almost 10xed my money with LTC and did a roughly 7x with my Bcash lol.

ETH to BTC: Ethereum Price in Bitcoin | CoinGecko

ADA to BTC: Cardano Price in Bitcoin | CoinGecko

Sure, you can find some alts that have outperformed BTC and the other alts, but these are the exception and not the trend we can see across the board. A lot of this is honestly pure random luck and speculation, much of it is based around hype and big money manipulating the price.

Ton coin is a great example, almost all of the supply is held by a handful of whales from something I saw a while ago.

Toncoin price today, TON to USD live price, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap

 

[jaygreenb]

Interesting read back on that lol. I definitely made a lot of mistakes with the last cycle for sure. My biggest one was focusing too much on alts, particularly Litecoin and Bcash, when I should have been 70%+ BTC the entire time. It would have prevented me from moving funds around as much as I did and more or less been a fairly stable portfolio. With that said, the time to have heavily loaded up on alts was 2020, which is exactly what I did. The mistake I made with that year though was not buying enough ETH.

This cycle I learned my lesson. I bought BTC up heavily at the bottom of the market 2nd half of 2022, my average price was a hair under 20k. From there, I've been heavily accumulating ADA at the low points in the market; winter of 2022/2023, summer-fall of 2023 and more recently this summer/fall of 2024.

This is a fantastic time to be loading up on alts right now, as they are bottoming at cycle lows with their BTC pairs. ETH right now is trading under .04-BTC. You could throw your money into just about any alt and when we start hitting up when QE takes over you are basically set to make gains. I'd say ETH at best you can maybe 5x your money from here tops, but with the rest of these mid caps it wouldn't be all that difficult to do this and potentially more. Hell, last cycle I almost 10xed my money with LTC and did a roughly 7x with my Bcash lol.

ETH to BTC: Ethereum Price in Bitcoin | CoinGecko

ADA to BTC: Cardano Price in Bitcoin | CoinGecko

Sure, you can find some alts that have outperformed BTC and the other alts, but these are the exception and not the trend we can see across the board. A lot of this is honestly pure random luck and speculation, much of it is based around hype and big money manipulating the price.

Ton coin is a great example, almost all of the supply is held by a handful of whales from something I saw a while ago.

Toncoin price today, TON to USD live price, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap

Oh man, I did some of the dumbest things imaginable first cycle. My crowning achievement was buying 2 Walton guardian masternodes, buying 30k worth of GPU's that I paid some guy to run for me, he went belly up and sold all my equipment! Spent 3yrs tracking him down and beating my money back out of him. Not to mention all the alts that were a complete waste and I just rode down 99%. Only thing that saved me was I always kept 60%+ btc and had wins with eth,bnb and link. Live and learn though and that bear market I course corrected and took a different approach. First cycle almost everyone needs to learn the hard way, the overnight 100x is too tempting.

Now would be a good time to start buying alts with one caveat, you have the discipline and experience to sell at the right time. Most do not, especially those who have not been through a cycle or two before. In the moment, the greed and emotions are hard to handle correctly and you really have to be obsessively paying attention

 

[sangheilios]

Oh man, I did some of the dumbest things imaginable first cycle. My crowning achievement was buying 2 Walton guardian masternodes, buying 30k worth of GPU's that I paid some guy to run for me, he went belly up and sold all my equipment! Spent 3yrs tracking him down and beating my money back out of him. Not to mention all the alts that were a complete waste and I just rode down 99%. Only thing that saved me was I always kept 60%+ btc and had wins with eth,bnb and link. Live and learn though and that bear market I course corrected and took a different approach. First cycle almost everyone needs to learn the hard way, the overnight 100x is too tempting.

Now would be a good time to start buying alts with one caveat, you have the discipline and experience to sell at the right time. Most do not, especially those who have not been through a cycle or two before. In the moment, the greed and emotions are hard to handle correctly and you really have to be obsessively paying attention

As I've discussed with you on here before, I believe that the only thing worth holding for more than a given cycle is BTC.

I personally believe that ETH's status as an alt is more or less diminishing, from here it can at BEST maybe do a 2x or slightly higher compared to BTC. During the last cycle we saw ETH bottom out at a little under .02-BTC, it was in late 2019 around the winter of that year when it was trading in the $100-$150 range, I remember this distinctly because I was loading up on it back then. In 2021 it peaked to around .085-BTC, which is a phenomenal swing from low to high. However, now it's a little under .04, so I just don't think it's really worth obsessing over compared to BTC. The one caveat I would say to this though is that IF someone wanted to completely avoid speculating on alts but want to make better gains compared to BTC, buying ETH right now would be a great move.

We've discussed this before, but I don't think buying alts during the bear/accumulation phase is the problem. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of retail investors aren't loading up when things are "boring" but typically during times of hype and euphoria. A great recent example would be Q1 of this year when they announced the BTC ETFs. There was all of this talk about there being a left translated cycle and that we were going to break 100k by the early summer lol. Spring of 2021 was a great example as well, which was when we saw coins like Shiba Inu being shilled like crazy. I've recognized a pattern, which is whenever these meme coins start gaining a ton of popularity and attention is a sign that things are overheated. Basically, people buy alts at the worst possible time in the market and are basically stuck holding the bags for months or even years OR just outright selling at a massive loss.

With that said, I totally agree with your opinions about selling alts. Alts are not to be held but used for swing trading. There's literally no other asset class I can think of where you could easily 5x-10x+ your money in a period of less than a couple years. A good strategy is to just find some alts that have been around for a while that are still somewhat relevant (ADA, LINK, etc.). The overwhelming majority of investors are oblivious to alt-BTC pairings and don't understand how the cycles work. Basically, everything should be BTC until the halving year OR when alt pairs are bottoming out compared to BTC, such as what we see with the links I provided. I personally believe that ETH is the overall oracle of the alt market, whatever it is doing compared to BTC and in terms of USD will show the trends that the alts will follow.

 

[sangheilios]

Oh man, I did some of the dumbest things imaginable first cycle. My crowning achievement was buying 2 Walton guardian masternodes, buying 30k worth of GPU's that I paid some guy to run for me, he went belly up and sold all my equipment! Spent 3yrs tracking him down and beating my money back out of him. Not to mention all the alts that were a complete waste and I just rode down 99%. Only thing that saved me was I always kept 60%+ btc and had wins with eth,bnb and link. Live and learn though and that bear market I course corrected and took a different approach. First cycle almost everyone needs to learn the hard way, the overnight 100x is too tempting.

Now would be a good time to start buying alts with one caveat, you have the discipline and experience to sell at the right time. Most do not, especially those who have not been through a cycle or two before. In the moment, the greed and emotions are hard to handle correctly and you really have to be obsessively paying attention

If I could do this cycle and the bull run of 2021 all over again, this is what I would have done.

In 2021 when I was watching my portfolio grow like crazy, where alts were running hot, I should have converted some of my alts into BTC and cashed out my initial investment at the minimum. At the time I was making a lot of money with working and had a lot of cash sitting in a savings account, no debt, etc. so I didn't feel much of a pressure and was honestly content with just holding for the long term. With that though, I should have just converted everything into BTC.

With 2022 through 2023 it should have been entirely BTC and nothing else, while just watching the alt-BTC pairs slowly bleed. I should have studied this trend and when they were getting to very low valuations compared to BTC I then could have converted some of my BTC into alts. While BTC had done a 3x+ compared to it's lows of 2022, most of the alts are at the same prices they were back then and some are even lower.

With a good chunk of alts and still long term holding my BTC, I'd basically ride the market into euphoria and take profits. I dollar cost averaged in, with the plan being the reverse by dollar cost averaging out.

 

[jaygreenb]

As I've discussed with you on here before, I believe that the only thing worth holding for more than a given cycle is BTC.

I personally believe that ETH's status as an alt is more or less diminishing, from here it can at BEST maybe do a 2x or slightly higher compared to BTC. During the last cycle we saw ETH bottom out at a little under .02-BTC, it was in late 2019 around the winter of that year when it was trading in the $100-$150 range, I remember this distinctly because I was loading up on it back then. In 2021 it peaked to around .085-BTC, which is a phenomenal swing from low to high. However, now it's a little under .04, so I just don't think it's really worth obsessing over compared to BTC. The one caveat I would say to this though is that IF someone wanted to completely avoid speculating on alts but want to make better gains compared to BTC, buying ETH right now would be a great move.

We've discussed this before, but I don't think buying alts during the bear/accumulation phase is the problem. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of retail investors aren't loading up when things are "boring" but typically during times of hype and euphoria. A great recent example would be Q1 of this year when they announced the BTC ETFs. There was all of this talk about there being a left translated cycle and that we were going to break 100k by the early summer lol. Spring of 2021 was a great example as well, which was when we saw coins like Shiba Inu being shilled like crazy. I've recognized a pattern, which is whenever these meme coins start gaining a ton of popularity and attention is a sign that things are overheated. Basically, people buy alts at the worst possible time in the market and are basically stuck holding the bags for months or even years OR just outright selling at a massive loss.

With that said, I totally agree with your opinions about selling alts. Alts are not to be held but used for swing trading. There's literally no other asset class I can think of where you could easily 5x-10x+ your money in a period of less than a couple years. A good strategy is to just find some alts that have been around for a while that are still somewhat relevant (ADA, LINK, etc.). The overwhelming majority of investors are oblivious to alt-BTC pairings and don't understand how the cycles work. Basically, everything should be BTC until the halving year OR when alt pairs are bottoming out compared to BTC, such as what we see with the links I provided. I personally believe that ETH is the overall oracle of the alt market, whatever it is doing compared to BTC and in terms of USD will show the trends that the alts will follow.

Agree with this, I own a good amount of ETH and have done well with it but agree it certainly may have a diminished role, a lot of unknowns. It will most likely make lower highs when priced in btc over the long term. BTC is really the only thing I would have confidence I could throw in cold storage for 10yrs+ and it would still be relevant. In an ideal situation, I would like to sell all my alt positions this next bull cycle, diversify out in some other asset classes, do a few lifestyle upgrades and sail off into the sunset. Zero plans to sell any of my btc besides potentially some GBTC I have in a IRA I bought in 2017. If we get a modest bull cycle, it will put me in a position to restructure my life where I could sell my business and remove myself from having to continue to build.