Bitcoin Forum

Although the Bitcoin price declined sharply in response to the World Health Organization’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic last month, interest in the crypto asset from the general public is not lost. In fact, some Americans are taking their $1,200 stimulus checks and using them to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Here is the link to the full article by Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2020/04/20/americans-are-using-their-stimulus-checks-to-buy-bitcoin/#6f8ccb8a798f (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2020/04/20/americans-are-using-their-stimulus-checks-to-buy-bitcoin/#6f8ccb8a798f)

This topic has been discussed before, and the article doesn't put forth any new evidence. Surely, $1200 purchases are very suspicious and might lead to thinking people put their financial support money into Bitcoin. Maybe some of them actually do, but I don't think the available evidence is conclusive. For example, people could learn about the $1200 being the sum of money people in the US receive and symbolically put the same amount into Bitcoin to attract attention or to express what they would've done with the money. Or it can be a totally different thing that I cannot come up with.

As with always with these types of claims, the question is not whether it happens or not, but in what quantity. If 50-100 people or even a few thousands out of 328 million nation do this, is that really significant? It's like when some article says that "twitter is angry about something", and then it's actually just a couple of tweets from some nobodies.

The problem here is that some less experienced people might start having unrealistic expectations about the market, they will start thinking that events like US stimulus can move Bitcoin's price significantly and predictablym which is really wrong.

wrong.
bitcoin decline after every other major market (stocks, oil, gold,...) crashed hard. then it also recovered while the rest were continuing to crash.

well nothing has changed so i don't see why would interest in "bitcoin" would ever change. short term traders come and go and they don't represent the "interest" in bitcoin though.

i somehow doubt that.
of course many are buying bitcoin with their worthless fiat but if this was happening on a large scale as you claim then price should have been at least $8k by now.

Look at this link from CoinTelegraph (https://cointelegraph.com/news/data-suggests-some-americans-may-be-buying-crypto-with-stimulus-check)

The graph in there shows the increase in $1200 transactions as soon as the stimulus checks were sent out  :D

Good on them, I say. Better BTC than fiat!

I've been seeing a good market price right now for the bitcoin, I don't want to conclude that it was because of the stimulus checks that the american have received last week. But you are right, even if these checks are going to inject to the market it would just cause a small curve and that's it. I believe american that is investing in crypto is not spending their stimulus checks, most probably they are just spending what they kids want, the $500.

Speculation these days compared to the past few years is different, the expectation towards the market is very high that even a single mistake will keep them away from the market.

With the information shown in the chart, you can’t really conclude anything, as there is not enough context, and data is relative (i.e. percentages) and not absolute (i.e. number of TXs):

https://s3.cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/53bee6c7a5a1f789ab1ea97fcc1e5349.jpeg

Now the chart shows the number of buys/deposits for a value of 1200$ went up x4, but just how frequent is it to make purchases of 1200$ ? (probably surrounding values such as 1000$ and 1500$ are much more frequent and significant).

Lets say that of a given regular day, there are 1000 buy/deposit TXs for a facial value of 1200$. Going x4 would mean 3000 additional buy/deposit TXs from what’s normal, which is meaningless in the big (or even small) picture.

The key to understanding if the spike is meaningful at all is to provide the data in number of buy/deposit TXs (absolute values), and that is not the case. Nevertheless, all the media buzz replicas of the tweet without questioning the above.

Haven't read the whole story about Americans buying bitcoin with airdropped money, but I assume this case isn't going to either somehow affect the price of bitcoin or increase the level of adoption it has nowadays. Most likely, people who were buying bitcoin using that money had been already familiar with advantages of bitcoin, they already know that in times like this it's better to save own funds using sound money like bitcoin or gold. The vast majority of people are still walking in the darkness, not knowing what money is and how it should work, why it is not necessary for money being printed in order to save an economy.

I think 1000 buys estimate is way too generous, if it's 0.1% of total daily deposit + buys, it means that 1 million people buy Bitcoin every day. So even if with this unrealistic number the amount of people who used stimulus checks is still small, then the real number is even smaller.

People should learn from this whole story that relative charts are very misleading and if someone hides the absolute numbers, it's because they have something to hide.

It doesn't matter if it won't affect bitcoin's price (its not about a pump). But those Americans are outsmarting their government, exchanging vapor printed money with solid unique bitcoins. In the long run, should the USD collapse, the same things you can buy today you will probably be able to buy tomorrow with bitcoin, and possibly even more if you wait even longer longer.

That said bitcoin is back to 7.5k, which is the same price it had last year, it has already outperformed world's economy.

That was expected by some people here before the helicopter money was injected and, it actually happened. I guess those buyers already have planned it from the beginning but due to the circumstances that they were facing, they were unable to buy it.
If I'm also a beneficiary of that stimulus, I'd do the same. Budget for my survival, goods, et.al, then for buying bitcoin.

I would do exactly the same, because you will not lose this money, and you can still earn.