Possible (roughly estimated) Wyckoff cycle on BTCUSDThis is what I think may happen with BTCUSD based on Wyckoff cycles. I haven't checked the fibs or anything, so prices may be a bit inaccurate, but basically it works like this. Note that the prices here haven't been checked at all, and at the end of the day they don't really matter aside from the fact that market-movers know people look at them and use them to try to predict the market, which is nearly impossible unless you have enough money to set the market in your favor.
The people controlling the price (whales, institutions) can set walls wherever they want. They can cause the price to either oscillate within a range, to go up, or to go down. They are counting on human emotion (FOMO/ FUD) to drive the price one way or another.
Note also that, during cycles of Accumulation or Distribution, they are still accumulating during the lows of the Distribution cycles or the highs of the Accumulation cycles. So within these cycles are cycles of a lower magnitude.
The point is, the price is going to keep going up, because the asset has a fixed supply. They can prey on human emotion and lack of market education to predict what "most people" (the fish) will do. At the same time, they hold enough to setup walls and keep the price within certain ranges, allowing them to sell at the highs of that range and buy back in at the lows of the range.
This sounds stupid, because it literally is "sell high / buy low". In this case though, it isn't really all that stupid, because they can set the high and lows by creating buy and sell walls wherever they want to. Only a more powerful whale can really break their ranges, but that's pointless because it is in their best interest to work together and take the money from people trading on the daily, hourly and even sub-hourly oscillations. After all, they aren't counting on something going "to da moon" to pay their bills. They have enough money to survive a crash, or to capitalize on a "breakout" (which is when they stop selling and keeping the price within a range).
Most of these prices will look random, which they kind of are. But it's like putting 5 metronomes on a platform with a couple of cylinders beneath it - eventually the metronomes sync up. So their goal is less to "make money on this next day" than it is to "figure out a range that works in our best interest, and keep it going for as long as the little guys keep playing ball". Once smaller-time investors (people who have to go to work or are counting on good trades to pay their bills) dry up, they simply stop holding the price down and let people continue to buy. These are the people you should be following, because ultimately, they control the price.
That's the beautiful thing about Bitcoin. Its value is not predicated upon who has the most missiles, or who is developing some groundbreaking new technology. It is only predicated upon the assumption that it works, which it does (as a means of transferring value from one individual to another in a secure manner).
Altcoins are typically people trying to "print more bitcoin" by piggybacking off of the crypto movement in general and hoping enough fish bite the hooks. There are very, very few altcoins that have any intrinsic value which Bitcoin doesn't already have. I can't even think of one right now, so if you can please let me know.
