SCARY Trend in Bitcoin & Other Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have seen a drastic decline in exchange traded volume, transaction volume and overall interest in both traditional and social media. In this video, we discuss the decline in Bitcoin exchange volume, Bitcoin transaction volume and the increase in NVT ratio.
We also explore how media sites like Coindesk and Cointelegraph are starting to see their monthly visitors decrease as their Alexa ranks flatten and Cointelegraph sees a substantial 25 - 50% decline in views on some of its most popular price analysis articles.
Additionally, social media interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is beginning to decline as well, as we see the /r/Bitcoin & /r/Cryptocurrency subreddit subscriber growth plummet. Both views and subscriber growth has been significantly stunted on YouTube as well almost across the board. There appears to be decreased interest in other social media as well, including Twitter.
In my opinion, this is evidence that most people only care about price, not the "technology." The sideways trading action in the market over the past month has led many people to become "bored" with only minor double digit movements (I get a chuckle out of that) and less people are interacting than before.
Will interest pick back up again? Perhaps once volatility enters the market again, especially if we see a breakout to the upside, but it appears many people were burned from the last crash and sold out or otherwise became disinterested. What are your thoughts on this macro trend?
I wouldnt worry too much about it, Bitcoin was so many times dead, it wont die now, probably it wont die ever!
We dont need those people who came in December to make a quick buck. They would have get burned anyway... overtrading, jumping from coin to coin, even if the whole market would have just been going up.
I think the big deal will be a crypto friendly regulation in the EU (because Switzerland is already taking all the blockchain companies from around the world) and with that other countries need to decide if they want a piece of the pie of this growing technology or not.
And with regulation, institutional money will enter the market. And if they do it with 1-2%, that still would be huge for crypto. And that is what I came for a year ago... to sell my bags to the institutional investors and maybe adopt the technology along the way...
I agree - the gamblers leaving the market is a rather welcome change even if it does reduce overall buzz and interest. Should be interesting to see what happens moving forward with regulations, especially for the much more sensitive area of ICOs.
Yeah I am curious about ICOs as well, but worst case scenario will be, that they have to register as a security. This would hit the market hard, but the good projects will register as a security and then can finally do what they want (paying rewards, a dividend and work to increase the value of their token with the value of their company).
If we are lucky, some future ICOs will have to register as crypto securities with different laws and already done ICOs will be treated as normal cryptos, if they have good intentions.
Love it, I was noticing the exact same thing over the last few weeks. Your views are going down more and more and the same goes for here on Steemit.
But it definitely seems like a decline in interest. Cryptocurrency was going viral in December and now that people haven't made money and there hasn't been huge increases in prices people seem to be uninterested.
I myself have even been trading less, although still following everything a lot. I do get the feeling that it's a phase though. There's been a lot of doubt, a lot of bad news and scandals, price action has been going down or just boring, and all the frenzy has died down.
Like last year there was an explosion in the altcoins over the summer, and then they all died down. I did sort of expect a bigger increase in price action at this point in 2018, but I still think at some point we'll have another big bump up and everyone will start talking about Bitcoin and cryptos again. Whether that's next month or 6 months from now, I have no idea, but my hunch is we won't finish 2018 at a $400 billion market cap.
It's definitely indicative, however, of the focus more on profit than investing in some amazing new technology because you believe in it or want to see it grow. I think you can see that also in how there's starting to be a ICO for everything. Within the next couple years we might literally reach that, and then maybe that's when the "bubble" will pop.
We love to compare crypto to the growth of the internet, but right now it's still difficult to tell if crypto is in the equivalent of 1999 for the internet or 1993.
I would have to say that I agree with you but there are a few things that I think are worth pointing out and I feel like they are all interconnected in a way. I will try to form these thoughts as best I can:
tl;dr: Most people are interested in what technology allows them to do, not its inner workings. Cryptocurrencies do not (at the moment) allow people to do things that would dramatically change or improve their lives and get them interested and engaged. Currencies aren't interesting to most people anyway.
Very well-written. I agree with you, but I bring up the whole price over tech deal because so many people think they're in it for the "tech" which is USUALLY a flat out lie not only to whoever they tell it to, but also to themselves. Many people like the ideologies of cryptocurrencies without realizing the work it will require to achieve those ideologies (or how many of them can never be achieved). Thank you for the comment.
Of course crypto is cleary in a buble (as you've said and continue to say) and even in short term the price isn't very stable; but the tech still has some value > 0
Things like Steemit are one of the reasons I haven't tottaly given up.
The fact that something without a inherit value can have pecived value can bring a lot of attention and interest to a topic wich would otherwise be ignored. And greed is the engine on whice all of these values are mesh together and thrown in as fuel;
Just like politic interests gave us things like space travel or atomic science,
Greed, speculation and in-it-for-the-tech guys can give us things like Steemit (and, of course, CryptoKitties)
Maybe I sort of glossed over this in my initial comment but thank you for the video. Really enjoyed it. I image the ideas I explored earlier as branches that are all connected to what you said and form a larger picture together (as pretentious as that sounds). The three points are indicative of the fact that price must have been a stronger factor in the recent growth and fall of interest because none of the tech changed really.
Might be flawed!
Point 1: You did not account for the lightning effect.
Lightning does transactions out of the blockchain. The single lightning start/close transaction will tend to have higher value. This could explain all your chart observations. I did not calculate the lightning effect on that figures, neither you. Thus it is an open question. Your high focus on Bitcoin could also have lead to a misperception in that sense. I think the whole analysis must be redone.Point 2: Media hype = bubble != fundamentals
Media hype is dangerous, pushes market cap to non justifiable levels. Less (or stable) media attention lets fundamentals to improve with less disturbance. Sure, even I having 80% portfolio into crypto do not read as many news as in december/January. But i am not jumping off. This attention analysis was interesting, but i do not agree with your conclusion (or follow up).
I just think that the general pattern you described would be predictable and not indicate a crypto recession. The fundamentals for 2018 also speak very much agains recession or stagnation on crypto.
That click bait got me.
Seriously though, I'd say the decline in interest is due to one thing only : greed. There's isn't much FOMO and opportunities to make quick money in the market right now, so people are just forgetting what happened in December and are moving on with their lives.
However people who are really interested in the space (tech, making products etc) are staying and consolidating the ecosystem as a whole. So it looks actually less scary to me, but rather healthier. I've lost so much time with fomo and deciding what to do with trading, when I could have just let things play out and focus on bringing value to cryptos as a whole.
You said you're not really bringing value yourself, but you're wrong! You're educating new investors coming to this market. This is a pretty big part of it since there is so many scams and noobs to get into them. So many people making huge investment mistakes based on fear. I've learned a lot from you in terms of investment and that's why I stay subscribed.
General thoughts:
Nothing can stay on the top page of a newspaper/reddit/whatever forever, and the people who were interested or brought on by the last news cycle are already here.
I myself had only been tangentially following along with bitcoin and the last year and a half completely blindsided me. Now it is part of my Reddit front page, youtube subscriptions, and general information feed.
The tech is also not to the point that it can be easily be used by the general public, thus keeping the price in control of the speculation of the future value of the market.
Also, I can only talk to my friends and family about crypto for so long before the conversation gets repetitve/boring without them doing more research on their own.
@cryptovestor - Good observation and commentary, thank you for the video. I appreciate all your work and content.
I think the amount of media noise is just a reflection of market price action. We are in a much-needed consolidation period and this applies to news headlines too. 30% daily volatility is not healthy and is not sustainable for any market. I feel we are on the right trajectory and before we see a new major bull run, there need to be some more advances on the technology R&D and implementation sides. As more and more people are focusing their time, effort and creative energy on the space, I expect that such advances will be made sooner rather than later. Therefore, I don't really expect a crypto nuclear winter unless there is another more substantial market crash or a series of such crashes on a monthly basis. It's better to have a cool off period, so people who are committed to doing meaningful work can keep their focus and make blockchain tech and cryptoassets better. I'm pretty confident that cryptoassets are establishing themselves as an institutional-grade asset class, so that's positive. Once there are some more positive news on progress being made on solving known existing issues with the technology, and hopefully we see new breakthroughs, momentum will start building up again. Then we'll probably see the same cycle of hype, greed, FOMO, and eventually fear repeat, accompanied by a commensurate amount of media noise.
Would you agree with this view on market outlook? What do you expect as the most likely scenario to play out this year?
Great video. I still think:
The bear market is here, and will last for a while,
This is consolidation / accumulation period, when some traders or investors are just accumulating their coins.
Most important indicators for now are not the prices: better looking into legislations, government moves, projects expansions, etc. Fundamentals are crucial this period. Strong projects will generate cash, atrract long term investors, and not only survive this cycle, but they will thrive. Meanwhile scams, and weak projects will go bust.
Towards summer time, I think we will see more green days, and possible bull run will start.
This period, of "cooling down" is crucially important for the crypto space, as this way the market can slowly mature.
It's your repeated requests in your youtube vids to come to steem @cryptovestor that actually got me over here!
When you say that most people are interested in price, that actually includes me wrt BTC etc. The tech is awesome but there's not enough pain in the west around banking to make the tech as amazing as it is, a necessity.
On the other hand I'm into steem for the tech. I'm learning that it's not a FB replacer but it's still an amazing platform. And it's got me interested enough to be diving into the cli and more.
The transparency and decentralisation of trust that the blockchain platforms bring though are great for a little competition for entrenched institutions and government. One of the issues we have with government is that even though there are parties involved, government is still a monopoly so competition from such technologies is a gift to the people.
@newsflash you've made my day. Thank you for your generous vote.