With the current market movement (or lack of it) it’s important to understand the forces behind it and, at least to some extent, find reasons for the current stillness. Price has been moving sideways for a couple of weeks now, so when can we expect a nice pump?
Hopefully, with the assistance of some professional traders, we might find some reassurance, as the volume is expected to come into Bitcoin in the near future. At least, that’s what usually happens from mid-October to January. But, as you have now learned the hard way, there are no guarantees when it comes to price predictions.
One thing is certain, tho, price increases when positive volume comes into bitcoin; and positive volume is correlated to cryptocurrencies adoption both as an everyday currency or means to store value (look at Venezuela and Brazil, countries suffering from massive currency inflation problems).
Of course, adoption doesn’t only come from technology development, as cryptocurrency projects need to foster a better environment in terms of user rewards and incentives. If you’re not aware of the recent issues with mining contracts termination, check this article.
Why is price moving sideways?
On my latest couple of articles I’ve been kind of focused on Bitcoin and its underlying technology, the blockchain. I discussed the lightning network, why I see Bitcoin as the King of Kings and, of course, why so many people mistake blockchain for DLTs.
If we align the trend of how smart money and dumb money forces push the price upwards or downwards with the lack of interest from the general population, over cryptocurrency and bitcoin, it becomes clear why has the price been moving sideways.
Social Media trend lines
People seem to have lost all interest on Bitcoin. If you were looking for good news, this is it. When the markets are bleeding the hardest is when you can generally make the best entry points. Could Bitcoin price go lower? Does Google Trends give a perfect correlation between price and number of hits? Obviously not. Nonetheless, I would consider to take it into consideration, as it does show how people are feeling towards something.
Yes, the spikes match the huge price increases and drops which happen throughout late November 2017 to February 2018.
Worldwide volume
Another interesting piece of data is the Bitcoin trading volume. Even with the biggest run in 2017, Bitcoin trading volume on exchanges hasn’t reached the same peak levels as of the end of 2016. Quite astonishing, isn’t it? I would argue we will still likely experience a major bull-run, the issue is timing it correctly. There’ll be plenty of time as price still moves slow enough for you to be able to lose a couple of days of trading.
Time spent on the market
There’s a really nice article explaining why timing is so critical, but the gist of it is that if you miss, for example, the best 10 days of trading during peak highs/lows, you could lose potentially lose more than 50% of all potential profits. This is, missing the 10 best days can lower your expected returns in halve.
What we ought to do is to actually wait patiently for a good opportunity to either buy or sell; instead of worrying, take these opportunities to either average your losses, by re-buying bitcoin, or to actually dig deeper and study some techniques that can help you improve your predictions accuracy.
Nobody can time the market perfectly, but there are a few tricks to minimize your risk.
Looks shady, right? As you can see volume has been quite low across all exchanges. And we’re looking into bitcoin, the most traded cryptocurrency there is. This also shows that clearly there is no new smart money pouring into Bitcoin, as low volume usually means no huge quantity of fresh cash is coming into the market. By looking at the number of trades we can clearly see trading volume may not be the catalyst for Bitcoin’s price to explode.
New developments
Firstly although there are not many people betting on bitcoin, this doesn’t mean the technology hasn’t been improving. Over the last couple of years, two major breakthroughs have happened:
A number of lightning network implementation have been developed ;
Segwit is actually being adopted by bigger players (like exchanges).
Secondly, we look at the amount of data on each segwit activated block, as the purpose of segwit was to make blocks smaller, so capable of having more transactions per block. We can do this by looking into the sewgit transaction count.
