A few thoughts
- Price started dropping on July 31st. Unless there is something I don't know there are two things that could have instigated this:
- Block size drama-- Core not delivering HK hard fork agreement, which was supposed to happen by the 31st, and Antpool seems pissed about it and threatens to support another btc protocol. This was the most semi-bearish news to come out in recent time, because this kind of drama causes uncertainty in bitcoin. For what it's worth no one is talking about it right now, so thanks Bitfinex
- Hackers/insiders who knew about the hack got out early. This guy who claims to be the hacker (most likely a scammer imo) made a tweet on July 31st about his successful hack right before the price drop. If I were the investigators I would look into checking the origins of the huge dumps/shorts that happened on July 31st, if possible
This could either be the end of BFX or they could recover from this. Either way people are going to move on. The insane price drop yesterday was a direct result of the BFX hack and the community panic was clear as day. Did anything change about bitcoin's fundamentals or value proposition? If not then why would you expect the price to stay below $550? I'm not saying there is no chance that the price will drop further, or that we may stay below $600 for a long time because of this setback, but this event is not some nail to bitcoin's coffin... not even close, this was purely a BFX hack and this price is temporary.
Coinbase having server issues yesterday showed that many people, including myself, were confident enough to buy the dip.
The 120K coins are off the market for a while, unless the hackers are stupid, and I'm guessing they're not
Right now everyone is expecting the worst case scenario and the price is reflecting a worst case scenario-- that BFX is insolvent and that no one is going to be compensated for their losses. Depending on if/how BFX recovers from his and how well they handle customer losses, things could turn around really fast. Imo, whatever update they give us will most likely be better than the current worst case assumption
Other bullish scenarios for 2016
Core releases meeting minutes from the "secret" meeting they had with the miners in Silicon Valley-- and it's generally positive. They confirm that they still plan on honoring the 2mb HF + segwit with an updated timeline. Miners are happy, big blockers are somewhat happy and some uncertainty is alleviated
Winklevii and COIN ETF gets the green light... I think it's a matter of time, and I wouldn't wanna be sitting on the sidelines with my hands on my dick when the news comes out
TL;DR:
I'm pretty calm. The Gox incident felt a lot worse than this. BFX was hacked, not BTC.. if this was the main driver of yesterday's dip it will recover.