Bitcoin Forum

Is it significant in any way?
My impression would be that there are less people trading it and perhaps more storage going on? Or that a lot more trading is happening on other coins/projects/tokens whatever?
Looking from say 2017/2018 to now, it's pretty much a sharp declining line.

I am learning so feel free to enlighten me.

Your information is wrong.
According to Coingecko (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin), the 24 hour trading volume of bitcoin was around 3.5 billion dollars at the first day of 2017 and 2.3 billion dollars at the first day of 2018.
Now, the 24 hour trading volume of bitcoin is  around 36 billion dollars which is around 10 times the first day of 2017 and 15 times the first day of 2018.

The volume of BTC decreases as the stock market plunges down the hill. Since bitcoin is broadly used by many people, the price of bitcoin is rapidly correlated with the price of traditional assets which is now affected by macroeconomic factors like inflation, fiscal policy, employment level etc. 

These macroecononic factors affecting traditional assets and currencies has made more people interested in BTC and are using it, for holding and trading too, BTC volume hasn't experienced what the op is saying, which is a sharp decline.

I think you are wrong to say the price of BTC is correlated with traditional assets in that way; BTC is not inflationary, and when people lose faith in traditional assets and currencies they come to BTC as an alternative, so i believe BTC could thrive well when traditional assets are affected by different conventional problems.

Well, you start comparing, 2016 had way bigger volumes (in BTC!) than we will probably ever see: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/all?c=e&t=b
Reasons are many:
* it can be related to the fake volumes many exchanges were reporting and most probably during the years the reported volumes are getting closer to reality
* it can be changes in trading fees
* it can be somewhat related to the price (again, the chart I'm showing has the volumes in BTC, not in $); maybe the volumes in $ would tell a different story
* it can be related to big entities hoarding bitcoin

Overall I think that the numbers (related to trading volumes) are not telling the full / correct story and may be greatly misleading over long periods of time.

I am just looking at BTC/USD on Trading View and on the weekly zoomed out, those little red and green bars are telling me volume is dropping, they are getting less prominent? What am I missing here?

Different sources are telling you different things. They're showing not just different figures but also opposing ones. I think the real volume figures are difficult to determine. Many exchanges are not really providing truthful figures in terms of BTC volume. Most of them are exaggerating their volumes to show liquidity and attract traders.

Coingecko is showing that the volume has actually risen a lot but tradingview as well as bitcoinity is showing that the volume has already decreased. But the data provided by tradingview and bitcoinity are not as comprehensive as coingecko. They are only using volumes of certain exchanges. Coingecko is probably giving a total figure. But this is questionable because of fake volumes submitted by exchanges.

That's the part you're wrong here, why you're only look from BTC/USD market? BTC doesn't only have one pair, actually any coins and fiat can be traded with Bitcoin. You need to look from the whole BTC market, just like @hosseinimr93 mentioned above where the current Bitcoin's volume is +10x higher than 2017/2018 volume. Maybe the BTC/USD pair is decrease since many people doesn't want to sell their coin to USD, they're prefer to hold their coin.

Tradingview extract the data from exchanges and by default it's set to Bitstamp.
If you are looking at the data extracted from Bitstamp, that decline simply means that the bitcoin trading volume has been decreased on Bitstamp and they have lost the competition to other excahgnes.
According to Coingecko (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin#markets), Bitstamp's share from the total trading volume is below 0.15%.

One thing certain with bitcoin right now is that (just like it's tagged a store of value) with the decline from $68k to it recent all time low amount which i believe was a little above $17k, and then this recent sharp rise to the current price of $20+k, alot of investors are anticipating another bull season around the corner, so a greater number of investors/traders might have pulled a greater percentage of their money out from the futures market and buying bitcoin on spot market in order not to miss out just incase its a bull, so from this, it is likely that there is a lesser amount of bitcoin trades and more bitcoins going into store with hope for future profit.

i might be wrong though, which i totally accept because we all are just speculating.

What you are missing is that you do not check the data thoroughly until you are immersed in information that is completely invalid or even false. Because in fact the volume of Bitcoin from year to year has increased dramatically. There needs to be an in-depth study for you so you don't get half-assed information. Because if you don't read much and do research it will only make your thinking limited. Bitcoin will continue to increase over time and volume has come a long way from the first time Bitcoin was traded.

Why would a respected platform like Tradingview use crappy info like Bitstamp then? I can now see on Coin Gecko that yes volume is increasing, the exact opposite of Trading view?!
Is CG the preferred platform for stats?

You can get trading volume from Coinmarketcap or Coingecko but it is only a draw picture for you. If you are not in market, you will not know what happened in the past. Whether trading volume non-ogranically increased because some big exchanges run free trading fee (zero trading fee) events for users.

Like Binance did recent months. Such events can force people to trade more that will cause higher trading volume but it is not trading volume because of demand from investors or traders.

Zero BTC Fees: A Quick Liquidity Update (https://www.binance.com/en/blog/markets/zero-btc-fees-a-quick-liquidity-update-1176270749506750722)

Higher trading volume with time shows the adoption growth.
Lower trading volume in a narrow window shows a kind of accumulation, angry, disappointment, give up.

Tradingview allow you to change the data source.
Just click on "Bitstamp" to see a list including some other exchanges. I don't know why by default it has been set to Bitstamp. Maybe, it's kind of advertising.

https://i.imgur.com/s95y8W2.jpg


Coingecko is a website for tracking different cryptocurrencies prices.
The price and trading volume reported on coingecko is calculated using the data extracted from different exchanges with weighted average formula.

Maybe we can say its good to assume that btc declining volume might be due to holding of some users. Of course volume on trading can be checked online but some are just buying and holding which arent on the fata of coingecko and coinmarketcap. Traders build volume for it but the overall valuation can includes those holders and their capacity to see long term goal for btc.

Perhaps people prefer to hold more during this time of bear period than to trade, this could be the reason why the volume has declined from previous times (although you didn't show any graph to back your claim).
This is not a very easy time to trade, so only those who are highly skilled with trading knowledge are trading, others probably feel safer holding their asset. (just my opinion.)

Beyond that we don't know what we don't know.

RobinHood, PayPal, a lot of other places are not listed. How many people buying & selling crypto have left the exchanges and moved to other platforms that suit their needs better so how much trading is just not being shown. How much trading is being done on exchanges that are not giving their volume to coingecko and others? Things change and trying to extrapolate data without being able to GET all the data is pointless.

-Dave

Nothing to worry about here dude with time going on in the aide ways market movement the volume always decreases. So point to note ia Volume in the market is an indication of the market Volatility as the market progress with volume and as you better know its bears time + its sideways market movement which is the reason for less volume and vice versa. So I am hopeful soon the market is going to play an aggressive role.

It makes sense that the volume would decrease over time. There are a couple factors:

1. The price of Bitcoin continues to rise so that means less BTC transacted for same Fiat value.

2. Fees, lost bitcoins, corporations acquiring crypto, etc. means less actual circulating supply.

And that's pretty much it. There's only a limited supply of BTC. Anything with a limited, circulating supply is going to decrease over time.

I am just curious why and how you think Bitcoin volume decreases. Do you have any sources? If you compare it with the last ATH then it would be. But if you compare with a few years back then now high volume. Volume depends on trading. Better you provide any source of your post to understand what really you want to share.

OP already said that he was using tradingview chart. See this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5419048.msg61220187#msg61220187).
Since Tradingview uses the data extracted from Bitstamp by default and Bitstamp's volume has decreased, he/she thought that bitcoin trading volume has decreased.