The virus has returned!
The bull market is rampaging and our favorite scammer is in full force pumping his own illiquid coins with his overaggressive long positions. Steem is now up 77% over the last week, positioning itself at a rank of #217 on the market cap; just above Hive at #227. Tron itself has slowly ascended to a position of rank #11 on the MC, which is even more insane obviously. Currently nipping at the heels of Doge, it could easily flip the memecoin and find itself in the top 10, which would obviously be a very noteworthy accomplishment and get a lot of attention.
Of course we all know it's all bullshit.
And a lot of other people do as well, but clearly not enough. As far as I know, nothing has been built on Steem since we forked away from it. They can't even copy our hardforks. New users can't make an account there and start earning because all of the rewards go to the top 10 shitposters.
As far as Tron is concerned, I haven't really been paying attention to what they're building over there, but a lot of the work being done is rendered totally irrelevant when a single account has the ability to dump the network to zero on a whim. That's what we like to call extreme systemic risk in this business.
Is Steem stealing our thunder?
A lot of maximalists claim that altcoins (aka shitcoins) only serve to leech value away from BTC. Of course we understand that this is not true, and that a space like crypto has dozens if not hundreds of niches that Bitcoin could not possibly fill. It's even easier to get into this mode of thinking during the bear market when 90% of projects are caught with their pants down and crash to zero. Rugpulls and systemic failure become the standard. Everything looks like a scam because there's no time to properly research everything.
Given this knowledge it's hard to make the claim that Steem is syphoning any value from us whatsoever. Although it is possible they are borrowing some temporarily until we can definitively prove ourselves superior to market participants. The other day I met a guy who learned about both Hive and Steem at the same time, and he had to pick one pretty much randomly due to not knowing any better. This is likely a more common occurrence than we would like to admit. Perhaps Hive still has a lot of growing to do in order to definitively distinguish it from the 'competition'.
Alright well while I was writing this Steem just crashed in price by 31.7% within the hour.
No idea what's going on over there.
In any case I think it's pretty obvious we need to continue distinguishing ourselves from the sister chain. How do we do this? Eh mostly it's just a matter of patience and time. Centralized onboarding helps quite a bit (email/password and metamask logins). Also having a stable coin that actually works is quite nice.
While I'm on this note go vote for the VSC proposal by @vaultec. It's a smart contract proposal (Vaultec Smart Contracts) for Hive that will further build out the infrastructure of this network.
Capo
The days of roasting the infamous CryptoCapo have come to an end.
We had a good run.
Biggest bull trap I've ever seen,
but they won't trap me
The words will live in infamy to the end of time.
Bears have finally correctly flipped bullish.
The bull market started a year ago and only now has market sentiment caught up.
Human psychology is weird like that.
In a year everyone will forget that 2023 was a bear market, because it wasn't.
More current events
Blackrock ticker
In other news yesterday the Blackrock ETF ticker $IBTC was removed from the site and caused a minor panic. Then it was put back on the site along with Fidelity as well. Conspiracy minded people such as myself can't help but wonder if it was actually Blackrock that was responsible for the Cointelegraph fakenews, and now that this has happened it looks even more like slight manipulations and testing the market. Of course it's also possible we're reading too much into it and all of this stuff is just a coincidence.
However when we look at Larry Fink's interview after the fakenews occurred the statements he made were pretty clear. He officially can't talk about the status of the ETF, but the confidence exude and the "flight to quality" narrative paint a pretty clear picture.
It's obvious that Fink knows his EFT will be approved, and now that Grayscale has won their lawsuit in court he also knows that it is legally impossible for the SEC to decline the ETF based on "market manipulation". What better time to manipulate the market than right now? You've got to admit the timing is pretty crazy.
BTC speculation
It's possible the timeline on this flag is actually playing out much faster than I expected. These are 4h candles and they show a possibility that the flag has already completed and we are at the precipice of another 20% god-candle up to $40k resistance. The 1D candles haven't been invalidated yet, but will be is spot price ascends to something like $25.5k. The last pump made it to $25.1k and almost barely invalidated the 1D flag. Alas, it is still in play.
At this point I'm convinced that it's simply a matter of time for when the market pumps. Many traders see the low liquidity and are loading up on shorts due to this "sign of weakness". This is exactly what bulls want. Rather than being a sign of weakness this is actually a signal for one of the biggest supply shocks I have ever seen.
Volume on August 30th when Grayscale won their court case was x4 times higher than it is during this rally, and the price only moved up 5%. The price spiking on low volume isn't a sign of weakness, but rather of crippling supply shock. There's no Bitcoin to be purchased even at a 20% higher price point. The market must move up 20% again to incentivize more selling and get that increased volume that it so desperately craves.
While the pump could come immediately I'm still leaning toward the daily candles which would require at least 3 more days to play out. 4h candles will be invalidated today or tomorrow if and when price returns to the $24k average. I'm somewhat expecting a pump on November 1st or October 28th. I guess we'll find out!
Conclusion
Justin Sun is a scammer and this rally is just getting started.
So someone made money on TRON and decided to funnel it into STEEM inconspicuously...
Then they probably tried to run a little promotion to get some bagholders in...
And finally, sold it all on market orders.
Some banks are known (in 'conspiracy' circles) to trade CME for a loss on purpose. Huge market orders at the most illiquid hour possible.
That's a pretty wild story.
I wonder how much loot they made off with.
Mostly on bullion. Just look at a half-day or something. The precious metals especially. Usually at night and on US holidays (the markets trade 23h/day - Hong Kong, Sydney), and this is when they make billion-dollar orders...
That is when order books are empty.
Volume plays a large role in things. The less real volume, the more easily manipulated (in the short term - but do it enough, and there's long-term effect too).
Most manupliation is made possible by leverage too. Leverage is the big fish's tool. It's why you sometimes see huge 'ripsaw' swings. That's algos determining they can 'spend' millions to 'earn' billions, with just a quick, artificial squeeze.
It's also why 1 or 2 central exchanges are bad. When you can see everyone's 'max pain' (liquidation points), then it's like having your own money tree. All you need to do is employ the shakedown.
Watch, Thanksgiving is coming up. Gold should be over $2k then. US markets will be closed. It will get smashed down big, a huge candle. Bet on it! I will tag you and show you. They will bring it down 3% at least.
I know it doesn't have much to do with anything. But it happens all the time and no one talks about it.
OMG, Steem is still here?
i know right
I keep wondering if i should sell my steem.
My thoughts were, i want to leave my writings for the most people possible to find.
But, there is almost nothing happening on STEEM.
So should i just sell it all?
Oh wait, it dumped...
I don't understand, objectively Justin has enough money to blow, he spent a lot bidding for a dinner with Warren Buffet, if I recall correctly. If he spent a fraction of a fraction of what he spent on Steem acquisition they could, at the very least, blatantly copy our hardforks and open source projects, but not even that.
Steem = artificial and stuck on time
Hive = organic and developing
It would be awesome for both if they had their own devs doing their own thing so we could both improve on top of what each other build, but not even copying they do... Shame....
My understanding is that there's actually a lot more technical difficultly in copying what we do than one would logically assume. Especially now that we've done multiple hardforks in a row while they've done nothing.
This worries me:
https://defillama.com/protocol/justlend
Or perhaps in the next Bull Run JS exit scamming with $5BN won't even be a drop in the ocean?
With that kind of money, he can pump STEEM to well over £1 just for lolz.
Im kinda the same boat waiting to see how the month close waiting for HIVE and BTC take a break so I can buy some more, its hard for me to sit on my hands right now, on profit but I was expecting to buy for the rest of the year on the range HIVE was in, its only 12% up since my average buy, not much but its that feeling thinking everything can keep going up in a matter of days and never come back down, eventually it does stop and go to previous levels, going up this way is crazy to happen before the halving, the opposite idea of what everyone was expecting, touche
Lol. This post might interest you
1.32M new users in 24 hours.
lol
In the Justinverse
Gotta love $STEEM falling off a cliff:
I was completely forgetting of supporting VSC Proposal! Thank you for reminding me about it :)
The pump of Steem is actually funny right now
Interesting turn of events.
I've been following your posts for years and have noticed a significant improvement in your writing style. Good work!
The pump of STEEM was nothing but a Korean pump and dump...
steem just being a pump and dump shitcoin
Did you see the CoinTelegraph article about LBRY?
It lists LBRY as having 11 million unique monthly users, and second was Steemit with 3 million. Hive was way down on the list with just under 100k unique monthly users.
I need to do more research, but wanted you to know.
One important detail I saw Eccency on the list higher then Hive, which seems counterintuitive, unless you assume the author is counting all Hive Front Ends as separate communities.
Loved the summary :)
Come what may, there is no way steem will be able to rise above hive. For sure, the kind of sure growth hive is having and the caliber of people backing up hive which steem doesn't have is a sure sign that hive is just waiting for bull run.
When it will skyrocket, steem wouldn't see the back of hive.
Check out this Coingecko info listing Steemit as the second largest Social Media on the blockchain.
https://inleo.io/threads/view/shortsegments/re-leothreads-2schgjcxs
Speaking about Il Capo, this is what Chat-GPT says about him:
And I thought that Chat-GPT was way off the mark when it came to coverage of history and politics in my neck of the woods. :)