Is This The Scariest Bitcoin Chart Of Them All?

Over the weekend, primarily because there was nothing else to talk about in the lead up to Christmas Day, the Western financial news media focused on Bitcoin and its apparent inability to recoup last week’s losses.

Although the crypto standard-bearer did manage to stage a meaningful rally off the Friday crash lows below $11,000, some commentators were surprised that it subsequently languished in a range that represented losses of between 20% and 30% from the record highs hit just prior to the launch of CME futures last Sunday.

Of course, it’s difficult to know whether anything meaningful can be divined from the price action over the holiday weekend. “The West is what’s causing this selloff,” Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at Tel Aviv-based online broker eToro, told Bloomberg, noting an uptick in trading in dollars and a downtick in yen volumes.

Whatever the case, Bitcoin did manage to bounce back on Tuesday, rebounding above $16,000 in morning trade.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Stephen Gandel (he writes for Gadfly) was out with a piece on Friday documenting an interview Bloomberg TV did with Fundstrat’s Tom Lee. You can read that piece for yourself, and you can also watch the interview at your leisure, but we did want to point out one thing. Gandel takes Lee up on the idea that Bitcoin’s meteoric rise is justified by transactions and he looks at the value of those transactions as documented extensively on blockchain.info.

“At the start of the year, there were $275 million in daily transactions in bitcoin; earlier this week, that had grown to more than $5 billion,” Gandel writes, adding that the percentage gain there “is more than the rise in bitcoin this year, even before its [recent] tumble.”

Well, we decided to plot the transaction value against the price through yesterday and when we did, here’s what came out:

BitcoinTransValue

You can make of that what you will, but if you’re buying Lee’s logic or, perhaps more to the point, if you’re buying Gandel’s take on that logic (because all of this is open to interpretation), that visual doesn’t seem to bode well.

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Moon Kil Woong 6 years ago Contributor's comment

Even if his chart proves true, the longer term #bitcoin players still made out well. Those predicting an absolute collapse of this are mistaken. At this point in time the issue is really how this technology will evolve more than anything else. It has already proven its ability to endure. $BITCOMP

Michele Grant 6 years ago Member's comment

All it would take is for governments to step in and seriously curtail or outright ban #crytocurrnecies. Like China already has.

Moon Kil Woong 6 years ago Contributor's comment

I think China's rule is fuzzier than it appears. I'm sure they are still mining there. The issue is China doesn't want bitcoin to lead to an easy way to get money out of the country unnoticed.

Michele Grant 6 years ago Member's comment

Makes sense. Though I think all governments are worried about a currency which they can't regulate or track. Especially when it comes to criminals and terrorists.