Bitcoin Forum

EDIT: Post updates:

End of February Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)
End of March Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)
End of April Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50841890#msg50841890)
End of May Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51296005#msg51296005)
End of June Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51680720#msg51680720)
End of July Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg52019246#msg52019246)

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I still cannot decide.
There is a number of different issues pointing to an higher or lower bitcoin. Both are valid, but still I cannot decide which one will prevail and when.
Here I collect a few evidences, trying to sum up a few conclusion. I don’t think every one of this indicators has to be fully trusted independently, but looking at them all together might give us first of all a clear snapshot of the current environment, secondly might help rationalize it.
There are a lot of graphs, I will post here both picture and graph link, so you can check the source independently.

BULLISH: Halving.

We all know that in May, 2020 bitcoin will halve mining reward from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC, this mean every day the number of bitcoin mined everyday will drop from 1800 to 900 dropping actual inflation rate from 3.82% to 1,80%. Just for comparison the rate M1 (money + money like instruments) is growing in US is 5%.
An new way of looking at is is thinking at the impact of money inflows on the market:

https://twitter.com/HassMcCook/status/1092593192854159360

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob0eebc8f118632eba.jpeg

Just to give you an idea: I told you before M1 is growing 5% annually: this means $500m are created on a daily basis, in USD only (other CB’s are increasing money supply at similar or higher levels).
Halving will happen in May ’20, history told us pre halving rally starts 6ish month before, this leaves us with at least another 10 months of crypto winter ahead of us.
Provided history repeats again this time everyone expecting it to do so.

BULLISH: Layer 2 applications - Lightning Network

https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
https://graph.lndexplorer.com/

Lightning network recently capacity 645 BTC. This is an impressive growth for a technology still in his full development, needing a border line reckless attitude to put funds in it, being the change of losing those fund not negligible.
This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralised, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers.

BULLISH: Transactions number:
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

We had times where Bitcoin prices went up without transaction number going up accordingly, now the opposite is happening: transaction number is back to a steadyily high, and growing, level, whils price is still lagging behind.
If we couple this finding with the growing success of LN, then we can be positive about the future.


BULLISH: Cryptopia, Quadriga Exchanges disasters

https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/7157/cryptopia-hack-timeline-as-it-happened.html
https://www.coindesk.com/quadrigacx-crypto-exchange-users-say-they-still-cant-get-their-money-out

Yes, those are actually bullish news. Firstly every destroyed bitcoin, is a bitcoin actually lost forever, meaning available bitcoin are even less than theoretically available, thus increasing value of remaining bitcoins.
Secondly, exchanges are the weakest link in the cryptosystem: subpar operations, poor security and suboptimal protection for the inexperienced users are the norm so far. There’s a reason if one of the first suggestion is not to keep your funds on an exchange. This is meant to change, if we want cryptos to succeed: we have to make exchanges evolve toward more evolved context. If this must happen via Darwinist-like evolution (of both users and exchanges) or via law enforcements is yet to be seen (I prefer the first one, but I am open to suggestions).

BULLISH: Bitcoin working for what it was meant for by Satoshi, uncensurable Store of Value.

This is not my idea, but it is too relevant not to be added here.
There is a very nice work by Matt Ahlborg  https://medium.com/@mattahlborg/nuanced-analysis-of-localbitcoins-data-suggests-bitcoin-is-working-as-satoshi-intended-d8b04d3ac7b2 (https://medium.com/@mattahlborg/nuanced-analysis-of-localbitcoins-data-suggests-bitcoin-is-working-as-satoshi-intended-d8b04d3ac7b2) applying big data analysis on Localbitcoin raw data.  I do recommend the whole post, but the main finding i carried away is that Bitcoin is personal, uncensorable financial sovereignty. Local Bitcoins volume analysis allow to grasp this reality emerging in countries where personal freedom is endangered. This is a symptom that begun to be observed only there, but the reality is that this i a fundamental value that has everyone of us potentially impacted, and not only on a dystopic future, as JP Morgan want us to believe.

BEARISH: Unique addresses number is not picking up

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7

Unique Bitcoin addresses used has shown signs of stabilization, but they are at levels last associated with much lower prices:  we have a number of addresses first seen at the end of 2016 lows that were associated with price range of $700-$1,000.


BEARISH: Volatility and NVT

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob4cd8cd83246a8432.jpeg

Here a couple of more technical indicators: realised (historical) volatility coupled with Network value-to-transactions (NVT) ratio.
The first indicates the realised swings of Bitcoin Prices, the attached graph shows a blue line of such index computed over the last 120 days.
The second can be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found here:
https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/
Both are heading down, but remain far-above the levels that have typically marked price bottoms (NTV Ratio above 40 signals a bottom on the market) . The end of 2015 was the last time these measures marked a nadir. That near-simultaneous trough set the stage for the bull market, when prices surged from $300 to $19,000. The indicators should breach the 2015 low, if history is a guide, notably volatility to signal the end of bearish market. At the moment both indicators are well above those lows, and there’s a pressure and space for them to fall lower together.

BEARISH: USD Exchange Trade Volume

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

Exchange traded volume are touching multi year lows. Also Bitcoin future activity (open interest) is hovering at minuscule levels both on CME and CBOE futures, evening considering the “business cycle” of such instruments.
Low volume are correlated with low prices, and last time we had this volume on exchanges, back in first days of August ’17 Bitcoin price was hovering just USD 3,000. As I said speaking about halvening, big volumes are needed to sustain prices, and future open interest is a signal of “interest” of Wall Street, or broader traditional finance, on the world of cryptos. It is not a good sign if this interest is at low levels, even remembering that is not Bitcoin that needs Wall Street, but rather Wall Street that needs Bitcoin.

CBOE future
http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures
CME future
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html


BEARISH: Transaction Value is not picking up .

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

Highly correlated to Bitcoin (BTC), estimated dollar-transaction value has declined to levels last when the cryptocurrency's price was about $2,400. For most of 2018, the measure flashed warnings that BTC was priced too high. It still is. May 2017, when BTC first traded above $2,400, was the last time the 30-day average of dollar-based transactions from Blockchain.com was at current levels. Despite this average measure of past transactions, the scale of our graphic shows it acts as a leading indicator.
Clearly in a downtrend, with prices briefly dipping below the white transactions line in December, BTC should drop a further $1,000 just to catch up with plunging transactions. When 180-day volatility bottomed in October 2015, transactions were in a clear uptrend. We expect new lows in volatility for a similar indication.

EDIT:
Please note that i didn't include anything about mining cost. I hence dismiss mining revenues as an explaination of bitcoin price.
Of course low prices cause miners to sell more and more bitcoins to pay their FIAT bills, but least efficient miners will be eventually pushed out of business, difficulty will adjust and equilibium would eventually be gained again. 
So only a temporary effect.
Ready to be proven wrong.


What are your thoughts?

I was initially skeptical about the exchange issues but got it after your explanation and I'm with you on that. One amazing feature about crypto that many haven't realized is that everything about it speaks about decentralization. Should trading occur mostly of DEXes, fund losing will reduce drastically coz no one will be a custodian of your Gold for you.

Also, for the transaction volume aspect, I'd say we should givebthe market some more time, it'll pick up along. What I have realized is that many people are of the notion of "wait and see" so they're psychologically watching tonenter at another new low which no one kniws whether it'll happen or not. Anyways, any breakout sooner or later will bring us alk the volume we need.

Overall, I'm bullish here lol. I believe we've reached the bottom. This is no TA buh I want to be one of the first people who called out the bottom.  ;D

Nice analyses. Good job mate!

Thanks.
While I do agree on DEX in principle, those are still a very tiny part of global trading today, so I don’t think they could tilt the analysis on either way. Also because they lack a series of features that are compulsory for a large part of institutional investors.

1 trillion marketcap is still low, gold has a 7 trillion marketcap and that is mainly from store of value.  The world is moving to a digital world and gold is a hassle to transport globally while bitcoin just requires a few clicks of the mouse.

So true.
Next step is: if you think digital gold (Bitcoin) can be equal in store of value to physical gold, and physical gold has 7 TN of market value, what is the “fair” value of the digital gold, provided there are only 21 millions unit of this?
That was one of the back of the envelope calculations I made when I decided to invest in bitcoin.

I think bitcoin is looking for directions..It is stable now .But more chances of going upwards as any price less than $3k is not sustainable for miners

As you can see mining price is not a reason to be bearish or bullish. So I discard that explaination.

Based on your findings, it is typical of an asset to have the results you gathered. The bearish cases are in line with the general sentiment of the market. On the other hand, the bullish cases are also typical of an oversold and undervalued market.

Basically, the Bitcoin market is due for a rally but everyone is still waiting for another drop (bearish sentiment, low volume)

For me, the Lightning Network is wasted as a bullish factor.All the hype regarding LN is already gone.
The transaction volume increase shows that there is some demand for bitcoins(at the current low prices),which means that there is support of the current price.
BTC will go bullish after 2 years,despite all the bearish factors.

It doesn't matter what the miners will be making, we all talked about how bitcoin wouldn't go under $5.8k back in the day because that wouldn't allow miners to profit and the cost was too much for them to keep on mining when the price goes lower than that which means the price would stay above that. What happened afterwards ? Price dropped so much that many miners left the mining equipment idle and that caused the difficulty to drop and made the cost of mining a lot cheaper and here we are now.

Do not even attempt to think miners will have anything to do with bitcoin because they don't and they never will. It is the whales and the public opinion that shapes the price of bitcoin and according to what people think bitcoin worth the price changes.

This is a very interesting thread. From now on the block halving is going
to get more and more attention.

In crypto im normally have a glass half full attitude but to me those bearish
points outweigh the bullish ones.

Im wondering will the block halving bring out the bulls or will it be just a
temporary rise followed by a correction back to bearish?

Great OP!

Yeah,  I do agree, basically it is the same reasoning I did a couple of posts above.

The most important factor now might be the upcoming bitcoin reward halving which is dated for mid next year. This could have a more than significant impact on the price, in the interval before that time however, some suggest the market would again turn bullish in the coming months and recover some of the lost value.

This is why halving is first on the list on the bullish part of the post.

I think I read somewhere that we can recover the lost bitcoin later in the future (20+ years), oh here:

Source: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/57654/curious-about-lost-bitcoin

But you are correct it is a bull case because, in the not-that-long run, BTC supply will get more pressure.

that's our hope. hopefully after mid-year, bitcoin will see its glory, and a bullish trend will occur. so that investors grew their trust again and the crypto market returned to excitement

Nice post :) I'll give my opinion about some of your assessments.

I consider halving a bullish event, but more a psychological factor than one really tied to a supply-demand question. The influence of later halvings on real supply is tiny, because there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of sellers and buyers apart from miners, and I am sure most investors already price in the final number of 21 million bitcoins when they estimate a possible long-term value.
Fully agree here. However, I'm a bit sceptical about layers built on top of Lightning, because Lightning itself is not totally trustless, and thus, problems at this layer may "spread" up to layers built on top of it. I would prefer sidechains (with the Drivechain model as my current favourite) as a "second base layer" and Lightning networks as third or even fourth layers.

Agree fully. Similar to 2015. Quantity Theory of Money eventually will do the trick if the long-term trend prevails ;)

Here I disagree:
The influence of "lost bitcoins" on valuation is tiny, and it's possible that we won't know for a long time if the bitcoins really have been lost (as it happens now with Satoshi's coins).

I share some of your hopes, but I don't think they cause the news about exchange hacks really "bullish" ones. I think that even without hacks the ecosystem should tend to improve, so imo I would consider them "neutral".

Agree. I think the current situation is that we don't have a high influx of new Bitcoiners, but the current Bitcoiners are using their Bitcoins more frequently. This could drive more people in in the future, but currently for the average Joes Bitcoin is "dead".

It's however debatable if the spam attacks in 2017 have inflated the number of unique addresses in a disproportionate way and we're now "back to normal".

Agree mostly, but I have to investigate more about NVT to really give a qualified opinion.

Imo this is more a consequence of the current crypto winter than a bearish sign for the future. It is neutral in my opinion, it means that the winter hasn't ended, but that doesn't mean that the bear market has to continue.

Here I tend to disagree again; smaller values and higher transaction volumes may be a sign of more usage "as a currency" and less "wallet-to-exchange-and-back" transactions, which are often speculative. Apart from that, the downward trend in this indicator may be simply a consequence of the sinking price (if you own 1 BTC, you won't transact 2 BTC if price drops from 6000 to 3000).

I would evaluate this indicator to be simply neutral.

Wise decision, fully agree.

In short, I mostly agree with your post, with some differences in details. I think a real trend change to bullish is still away, but we may be headed sideways for a pretty long time ... like in 2015. And we all know what happened then after a year ...

I think halvings are not a psychological effect, but proper discontinuities in supply of Bitcoins, white a real effect on various aspect of protocol : mining revenues digitally impacted, hence hash rate and difficulty adjustment. But actually the tweet above demonstrate how the bitcoin supply is actually halved from one block to the next one. So effect on price is not a psychological effect, but rather a fact.

This is actually a good point. I didn’t think about that. Luckily this is not going to be an issue anymore, first because the person responsible for those attack are almost financially dead, but also because Layer 2 solution and Segway utilisation have caused those attacks to be so much dearer to pay.

We are not sure if the next halving will be have a positive output to the price of bitcoin or it will help to recove the market. We still facing bearish market and all of us are now suffering to a big losses. Maybe some investors already lost their hope in bitcoin but to all investors that still believe in bitcoin we must endure this bearish market because it will be end soon.

The tweet actually falls in a very well-known trap: the erroneous belief that there is a certain, measurable "fiat influx" necessary to move (or in this case, sustain) a certain price.

For example, let's say you have a "market cap" of $100 and coins valuated $1 each. In a low-volume period where the orderbook up to $2 is thin, it is easy to double the market cap if you buy all the coins in the orderbook. While in other periods there may be so many sell orders between $1.0 and $1.1 that it may be extremely difficult to move the price up even 10%.

In altcoins, this is a well-known phenomenon and it is actively used for pumping and dumping, but the principle also applies to Bitcoin: There is no "mandatory fiat influx" - and much less a "predictable" one - to sustain a certain price. Everything depends on the conditions of the order book.

Besides of that, the drop in inflation from 3.82% to 1,80% would justify only a 2% price increase per year. In bull markets, 2% per day are very common - totally unjustified by halving effects, but justified by speculation on future prices.

The first halving, however, may have had a much stronger effects on price, because 1) the weight of miners on the supply side was much higher and orderbooks were generally thin, and 2) the halving effect on supply inflation was higher (at the first halving, supply inflation went from ~26% to ~13%).

With respect to the second part of your post, I fully agree.

I agree with d5000 that transaction value and exchange trading volume aren't strictly bearish indicators.
If we assume the number of people in the space in 2019 is the same as in 2018 many of those people sold in this bear market and are now waiting to go back in with their fiat so there's no transaction volume and no volatility. Whoever was thinking about selling sold and is waiting for bullish patterns to show. 2015 was a very similar year.

I also feel that halving in 2020 will provide a very terrible price increase because many traders will be surprised to see that the price of bitcoin can rise again and become expensive and even more expensive than a few years ago.

Yes I understand what you mean here.
OF course market capitalisation (and derived indicators, like "makret dominance")  is an awful indicator of the reliability, success or value in a borader sense of any shitcoin.
I think it was one of my first messages here on the forum a long time ago.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4545628.msg40921522#msg40921522

Anyway I think halving is not actually fully comparable to this: in the LONG RUN money supply is a very important metric to value a currency. OF course you can manipulate demand/offer in the short run (guess what CB's are doing right now with FIAT currencies?), but in the end only sound money will prevail, and sound money are the ones what can attract capital inflows.

my two cents.

Bitcoin halving could bring bitcoin price rising again but many factor can affecting bitcoin price. More adoption can be a catalyst for bitcoin price and government regulation can bring more investor to market and invest in bitcoin. Bitcoin halving is one of many factor and hopely with halving bitcoin price will recover again

In this case, I fully agree. In Bitcoin's "valuation model" or "value proposition" halvings are definitively important: they ensure that long term the coin supply reaches a predictable maximum. As an investor, you always are able to determine your "share" of that maximum (the famous 21 million). That's what gives Bitcoin some gold-like properties.

What I question, however, is the (in my opinion, disproportionate) importance some people assign to the halving event (the moment when the halving occurs) in the supply/demand equation and thus, for the price movement around that moment. A bull market, in my opinion, can start anytime, not only around an halving event. The same applies for bear markets: the sinking miners' supply at a halving is not enough to counter a sustainable downward price pressure.

Added another bullish reason, based on work by Matt Ahlborg. Very relevant.

Thanks for the list, it's nice to have the main pros and cons in one place. However, I would include Rakuten accepting Bitcoin and Japanese experiment with cryptos as money to the list of the bullish things. As for the bearish, I think there should be a general point about "expert X predicting Bitcoin to go as low as Y". FUD really makes the price go down pretty often.
Even though sometimes things go in a different direction, there seems to be a positive correlation between halving and price growth from the past. It might not happen at once, it is not ought to happen, but it's likely that it will.

After almost a month I re read the post and I thought it would be nice to transform it on a monthly updated post.
Each month I would update the indicators, also reviewing each one given their significance in explaining price dynamics over the last month.

I decided to slightly edit the format of each entry:
For each indicator I will:

• declare the status of the indicator, comparing it with the last status,
• provide what I think is the time horizon you should consider this indicator valid for: as you can see most of them are on the medium/long. I don’t like trading in the short term (daily trading  is not for me) as there are completely different factors to consider, and I think that kind of analysis has way lower added value.
• Provide a rationale on why the indicator should be considered. Think of it as an explanation on why you should look at this indicator and how you should interpret it. I don’t expect this to change significantly from month to month.
  
• A brief comment on how this indicator evolved during last month.
  
• Post any relevant link where you can get more information and insight about each indicator.
  

Each comment should be read having in mind previous comments, like a conversation about the same topic resuming where it was left.


Halving: BULLISH
Last Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium


Rationale: we all know that in May, 2020 bitcoin will halve mining reward from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC, this mean the number of bitcoin mined everyday will drop from 1800 to 900 dropping actual inflation rate from 3.82% to 1,80%. Just for comparison the rate M1 (money + money like instruments) is growing in US is 5%. Many Centrals Banks around the world have target in terms of annual price inflation rate of around 2%. This means that by design FIAT currencies should lose 2% of their value yearly. For the first time in history the BTC will be less inflationary than FIAT money.

An alternative way of looking at is is thinking at the impact of money inflows on the market:

https://i.postimg.cc/htS3ZGf7/90-E9-E516-3461-4-D25-906-D-6-C29-B86431-F5.jpg

https://twitter.com/HassMcCook/status/1092593192854159360



Just to give you an idea: I told you before M1 is growing 5% annually: this means $500m are created on a daily basis, in USD only (as I said before other CB’s are increasing money supply at similar or higher levels).
Halving will happen in May ’20, history told us pre halving rally starts 6ish month before, this leaves us with at least another 10 months of crypto winter ahead of us.
Provided history repeats again this time everyone expecting it to do so.


Layer 2 applications - Lightning Network: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralised, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers adding robustness and immutability to the protocol itself (immutability of a protocol should be considered a feature, not a bug. Research the DAO disaster for an example).

Comment: Growth in the network is steadily consistent. Nodes, channels and capacity are growing every months at a steady rate. Vendors are adopting the technology quickly and development of new features is progressing amongst the different implementations. The torch challenge and Jack Dorsey comment (that are actually not price relevant)  have drawn media attention to it (that is actually price relevant, as usual).

Lightning network is now at 730 BTC capacity (+23% MoM) with little less than 7,000 nodes (+18% MoM) . This is an impressive growth for a technology still in his full development, needing a border line reckless attitude to put funds in it, being the change of losing those fund not negligible.

https://i.postimg.cc/kMsJh25x/40-D5456-C-07-D3-4-D2-D-882-C-6-C84-C32-CB041.jpg


Resources:
https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
https://graph.lndexplorer.com/
https://1ml.com



Transactions number: NEUTRAL
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Short Term
 
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

Rationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalisation, transaction number cannot be discarded.


Comment: During last month price has been lacklustre, so has been the transaction number. Transaction number is still in the high “recent range” but didn’t maintain the bullish momentum it had last month. Bullish with a little suspension of disbelief.

More sophisticated analysis however aren’t so bullish. Purging OP_RETURN transactions (Veriblock might have a role here) and other non payment transaction we see that bitcoin as a mean of payment is not properly picking up.

https://www.longhash.com/uploads/images/2019-02-25/ueditor_c541852ba873f960661ec40c4fed650c.jpg

Reference:
https://www.longhash.com/news/bitcoin-is-processing-fewer-payments-per-month-than-it-was-in-2016


Bitcoin is working for what it was not meant for by Satoshi: BULLISH

Last month we reviewed how bitcoin is actually working in a manner Satoshi Would have agreed on: Uncensorable store of value in now derailed South American regimens.
This month came another news that had a similar impact on LocalBitcoins volumes: government of Indonesia recognised Bitcoin as a commodity, providing users, both private and institutional, a legislative framework regulating Bitcoins. Result of those action was an explosion in volumes on LocalBitcoins in anticipation of legalised Bitcoin Exchanges. Absolute transaction amounts in BTC is not significative yet at a global level, but the volume dynamic with 15x increase is very important thou.Bitcoin here became a powerful accelerator of traditional finance: something probably Satoshi didn’t think of and probability didn’t like either. Anyway if Bitcoin is working as Satoshi intended, or Bitcoin is working as Satoshi didn’t intend, then the common finding is that Bitcoin is working!

Provided that bitcoins cannot be regulated, and the maximum extent of regulations can be the ambitions to create some “walled gardens” where well-behaved bitcoins can circulate under all the KYC\AML\market regulations that are today standard in traditional financial markets, this is a good example of what can happen when/if SEC allows traditional money to pour into Bitcoin. Also remember that Bitcoins doesn’t need Wall Street, but Wall Street does need Bitcoin.

If you like more last month’s reasoning, we still have news on Bitcoin working a reliable mean of wealth transfer: for the second year in a row Bitcoin transferred more value than PayPal.

Resources:
https://bitcoinist.com/indonesia-bitcoin-commodity-regulations/
https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/02/26/bitcoin-surpasses-paypal-in-yearly-transaction-volume-at-1-3-trillion/

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob9bd00e82542c40dd.jpeg



Unique addresses number is not picking up: NEUTRAL
Last month status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7

RATIONALE: unique addresses is a loose measure of users in the ecosystem. True, many users could share the same address (like exchange addresses used by many users) or vice-versa each user could have many adddresses (think about someone trying to entangle his addresses in order to gain some degrees of privacy).
Addresses numbers are also used in some kind of Bitcoin valuations involving Metcalfe’s law, or a law trying do determine the value of a network, users being the asset of such network.
 
COMMENT: Unique Bitcoin addresses used has shown some sign of bullish momentum during last month , but they are still at levels last associated with much lower prices:  as d5000 has correctly stated in the thread also, it could be possible that the spam attacks that have plagued Bitcoin in 2017 had their role in the address number. Now this kind of attack has become way more difficult and dearer (due to Segwit and L2), so we are back at physiological levels. We are still below 500,000 addresses thou, not much.


NVT: BEARISH:BEARISH
Previous month Status: Bearish
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Network Value to Transaction (NVT) is defined as the Bitcoin Network Value over the Daily Transaction Volume and be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found here:
https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/

COMMENT: Both are heading down, but remain far-above the levels that have typically marked price bottoms (NTV Ratio above 40 signals a bottom on the market) . The end of 2015 was the last time these measures marked a nadir. That near-simultaneous trough set the stage for the bull market, when prices surged from $300 to $19,000. The indicators should breach the 2015 low, if history is a guide, notably volatility to signal the end of bearish market. At the moment both indicators are well above those lows, and there’s a pressure and space for them to fall lower together.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob4ca6f7e12f350e6d.jpeg

Realised Cap: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: The realised cap attempts to improve the market cap by valuing different part of the Bitcoin supply at different prices , instead of using the daily close as market cap does: every coin, or more properly every UTXO is valued at the price of their creation. In a less technically correct explanation let’s say that  while Market Cap use the last traded price and multiplies it times by the coins in circulation, Realised Cap computes  the total value paid for each coin at the price they last moved on the blockchain

COMMENT: I do like this indicator not only because improve the market capitalisation, that is a very misleading indicator for crypto currencies, but also because it really grasps the “true hodling value” of Bitcoin. Imagine getting long at 100$, you probably still value your investment at that level. Of course you do MtM, but 100$ is probably a significative level that can be used by other to find significant price levels. I think, but I have to dig into it , that this indicator should be looked coupled with HODL Waves one.
Another interesting way to look at this is looking at MVRV (Market Value to Realised Value Ratio): I think the name is self explanatory. This indicator was designed by David Puell and Murad Mahmudov. Definetly more on this indicator and others derived from this on the next months.
Resources:
Realised Cap:
https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/
MVRV:
https://blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-market-value-to-realized-value-mvrv-ratio-3ebc914dbaee


USD Exchange Trade Volume: BEARISH
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

RATIONALE: Exchange traded futures are the closest instrument to Bitcoin Wall Street can touch to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. Provided the price will follow quite closely the Bitcoin price, or what can be observed in the relevant “walled gardens” used to settle the futures, what is interesting for us is the contract volumes, that can give us a few hints of the interest Wall Street has towards the digital gold.

COMMENT: in February the trend in low volatility we observed over the past several months continued unabated, and actually, despite a few double digit moves in price, volatility continued to slide south. This of course impacted negatively open interest and volumes on Exchange traded futures.

https://storage.pardot.com/77532/161902/xbt54_2.png

We have to underline that Exchange traded futures still represent a tiny fraction of total futures trading in Bitcoin: futures represent roughly 25% of trading in Bitcoin (75% being spot transactions), only 5% of this 25% is traded on traditional exchange traded Futures.

https://i.postimg.cc/zv0Y48B7/95-F910-EF-388-D-4-DDC-841-A-724-E7-A518831.jpg

I think however they are relevant as traditional finance player cannot trade on BitMex or other futures platform.And I think the looming shock on the demand side of bitcoin (shock on the offer ha already been analysed on the halving section) is the firehouse on the liquidity of traditional investment waiting to be open on bitcoin (that’s also why the next step in Futures adoption, Bakkt, is so important). 

This low volatility helped Exchange traded volume staying at multi years lows. As I wrote last months this is not good for at least two reasons: first low volume are correlated with low prices, and we have send this level is compatible with a sub 3,000$ price, but more importantly, for all the reasons we have clarified above, it is not a good sign if this interest is at low levels, even remembering that is not Bitcoin that needs Wall Street, but rather Wall Street that needs Bitcoin.

Researching this topic, I stumbled on the only contrarian indication coming from cumulate short positions at Bitfinex reaching yearly lows:

https://i.postimg.cc/4xXP78Nb/A1-ADD95-D-71-AD-4-EFE-A344-0-BEF8-F1-F8-F5-A.jpg

This is not enough, I am afraid.

CBOE future
http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures
CME future
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html


Transaction Value is not picking up: BEARISH
Last month status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

RATIONALE: observed together with Bitcoin price and transaction number transaction value can give some additional insight on how Bitcoin is perceived.

COMMENT:as we said last month being highly correlated to Bitcoin (BTC), estimated dollar-transaction value kept his has declined in a downtrend, with prices briefly dipping below the white transactions line in December, BTC should drop a further $1,000 just to catch up with plunging transactions. When 180-day volatility bottomed in October 2015, transactions were in a clear uptrend. Also here we observe that L2 layer is still irrelevant on the analysis.

JPM Coin: MEH, BULLISH
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you then they Join you. Yes, this has been the JPM trajectory towards Bitcoin and cryptos in general. Beware, I don’t even think JPM Coin is a crypto, or at least in the sense I like crypto to be. But let’s say it’s positive because they will eventually embrace Bitcoin after realising how dead and fallacious this JPM coin experiment is.



References for this post:

• A few toughs on recent bitcoin price  evolution:some are good, some are crap.
  https://www.ccn.com/10-reasons-bitcoin-will-party-like-2017-for-a-massive-bull-run-in-2019
  
• A great summary of Bitcoin valuation models, and how they evolved over time, I draw some ideas from there:
  https://medium.com/@adamant_capital/a-primer-on-bitcoin-investor-sentiment-and-changes-in-saving-behavior-a5fb70109d32?_referrer=twitter
   That article is gold. I have already drawn some ideas, but there’s more.
  

Last but not least, I would like to thanks all who contributed to this post, in particular d5000, who shared many useful insight, and Plutosky and Neo_Coin from “Bitcoin Pump!” Thread on the Italian board. 

What are your thoughts?

In my option btc is very much on the bullish radar as we have seen how it has rose to 4200$ few days back. So their is a lot of hope still exists that btc has not died or it will just not continue to fall. It can even rise and will grow in coming time. It is only a matter of time now where the bull run will begins.

My outlook is long term so I am always bullish.  I'm not worried about the next few months or even the next year.  I'm looking a decade in the future.

This is really the best to make a big profit long term. With cryptocurrency we should not expect a big profit long term just on holding in short term, trading is the one that gives a bigger earning in short term. With long term holding we'll surely get a assured bullish trend. Some even miss this waiting for big growth, and one such is the growth that happened is the past peaking of around $20000.

Very nice reports, I'm subscribing! And I didn't know that about Indonesia.

I agree with everything except 2 points,

"Unique addresses" shouldn't prove anything, even if we see a huge spike in the future we won't be able to tell if it came from new users influx, a hacker doing something or new exchanges. For example, Cryptopia alone will have to open so many new addresses for all its users after the hack, probably all of them this month.

"Futures", I find high volume of this more of a negative. Without any rules and regulation, people can manipulate the market using futures... but only if there's volume there.

Thanks.
I will try to find sone correction on the firs point you wrote to try to get more insight into it.
Regarding futures, I tried to focus on exchange traded futures on those platform you are fully regulated: you are subject to both  KYC/AML and all the financial regulations applicable to any financial market. So I cannot fully accept your point.

I think that Bitcoin is at a time when it is most likely to rise, the only thing is that it can be a bullish trap due to the current phase of the market, however, the Strong Hands will do their tests at higher levels of the market. In the same way, I think we should be cautious, because a fall may be prepared due to a strong rise, only to take profits.

we can only wait! we'll see how the total market cap from crypto passes ATH in early 2018.

of course it will happen even though it MAY not be in the near future.

bearish cannot be determined only from the price on the market, you can determine whether there is a bearish or even a current run that is from the trading volume between the supply and demand volumes.

actually crypto market is more or less bullish but because of bitcoin price, everybody very suspicious and dont know what is going to happen in the short time period. but it is still a good time for long time investors.

We are in the month of March and I think in the month of February we see a sign that bitcoin will might reach the price of $5000. But, in this coming more months we need to expect more because there is a big chance that bitcoin will hit the price of $6000-$8000.

Are these levels out of hope or analysis? You should provide sone evidences supporting your claims, otherwise this is dart throwing, not a forecast.

Surely there is nothing to be worries because price will get normal very soon and we know in crypto currency it use to happen so if bitcoin price is getting high not faster but continually so it is time to celebrate and have investment because bullish is certain and bearish is almost at end but till a few months we will have to hold patiently.

This is only your speculation and I do not believe it will happen, even if i wish and hope it does, but to be on the realistic side, I doubt it will.
With the latest movement, I now believe we would be in for a longer bear market that we already have,and this is a bad one because a lot of people are beginning to lose patience.
Every speculation,expert analysis etc have all failed,so we have only one option but to simply watch how things pan out

When the combined growth of the month is calculated, it is completely bullish. We haven't got a big marginal growth, but we have ended the month with a 11% growth from the beginning price point of the month. This has set the market reach around $3900 by now. Possibly this seems to be the initial growth for the small scale price pumping.

Before trying to give value to Bitcoin in x years, we need to understand what Bitcoin is: digital gold, value reserve, currency, commodity?
Basically it is none of this, and at the same time it is all these things!
If that were the case (and that's what I think), you will not have a $ 7 trillion market, the physical gold market, but we would have a $ 1,000 trillion market, and more.
That was one of the back of the envelope calculations I made to invest in bitcoins.  ;)



Me too
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4849889.msg43731865#msg43731865
7 months ago I made this post looking at the next decade of Bitcoin, after the 5 halving of about 2028, when 97% of all Bitcoins will be extracted and when there will be only 225 Bitcoin mined and available a day, with the current 1800 .
In 2016 there are 16 million people in the world with assets of over $ 1 million ..... what if even only 5% of these diversify their wallet and want to own even 1 Bitcoin?

Previous updates:
January OP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)
February Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)


Halving: BULLISH
Last Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium

Rationale: Yes, for the third time in a row this is the first reason why I am bullish on Bitcoin. As the reason I have explained in the two last updates are still valid, I will try to add another one inspired by a good Medium post by post from PlanB  (https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25)(Twitter: https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/bloba0e70716c8972c42.png

This idea of course it is not new. Saifedean Ammous spend a whole chapter in his book detailing how S/F is a good indicator for sound money in his book The Bitcoin Standard (https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861), but the post is well written and detailed, providing us with a nice price prediction I cannot disagree with.
The key message is that ultimately people now investing in "... silver, gold, countries with negative interest rate (Europe, Japan, US soon), countries with predatory governments (Venezuela, China, Iran, Turkey etc), billionaires and millionaires hedging against quantitative easing (QE), and institutional investors discovering the best performing asset of last 10 yrs". That's because Bitcoin will eventually be the ultimate form of hard money available to invest in.


Layer 2 applications - Lightning Network: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralised, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers adding robustness and immutability to the protocol itself (immutability of a protocol should be considered a feature, not a bug. Research the DAO disaster for an example).

Comment: network grew scaringly fast last month. Nodes and channels grew in line with past months (+15% MoM and + 30% MoM respectively)  but capacity really exceeded expectations topping 1,050 BTC (a whopping + 45% MoM) committed to the network:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob35bbb4e7a990b8f8.jpeg

Growth in capacity can be assigned to a single player putting funds in the network with a series of nodes with huge channels. Someone said this is an attack to the LN, some other underlined that this player put funds at risks in the network, so even if decentralisation would suffer, routing was expedited, hence cannot be defined a negative impact for the network itself.
Note also that even if growth in node is meaningful: now The Lightning Network Has More Active Nodes Than XRP, Litecoin, and EOS Combined (https://www.longhash.com/news/the-lightning-network-has-more-active-nodes-than-xrp-litecoin-and-eos-combined)
Ecosystem growth has been likewise magnificent with many vendors and payment processors jumping on the ship: the following infographic can give you an idea of the current enrolment in LN:

https://i.postimg.cc/3wrPqvKg/4-BF1-CD1-F-7177-4-F36-952-F-60-D7-A39-B5-A1-C.jpg

Technology progressed too. This month Lightning Labs, the team behind LND, put LOOP feature in productions (https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-labs-releases-loop-feature-for-bitcoin-payments-channels). This is a feature allowing more effective channel management allowing users to "loop out" fund from an unbalanced channel without closing them (effectively saving fees)

Of course there is a lot of space for improvements, above all on the usability, that is where new competitors are in town:

https://i.postimg.cc/X73BtjCV/69-EFBEC5-3-B62-4-AB5-9-C03-65-E8-A448-EA94.jpg

Mobile payments with LN are still cumbersome. User experience must be polished out, if we do really want Lightning network to thrive as a payment processor suitable for everyone.
Of course there are obvious implication in terms of privacy in favour of LN over Apple Pay, as outlined by Kyle Torpey's nice read on Foerbes "Why Apple Card Can't Compete With Bitcoin"  (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/#e83a285184bd), but I think privacy is a benefit must be granted to everyone, not only to the tech-savy can manage a BTC full node and LN receipt in the first place.

Resources:
https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
https://graph.lndexplorer.com/
https://1ml.com



Transactions number: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Short Term
 
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

Rationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalisation, transaction number cannot be discarded.


Comment: During last month price has been lackluster, so has been the transaction number. Transaction number is still in the high “recent range” but didn’t maintain the bullish momentum it had last month and actually reverted some of the recent gains. Bullish with a little suspension of disbelief, also it's very difficult to observe high level of hodling (crf. following analysis of Hodl Waves) and high levels of transactions.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe18c487ea875efae.jpeg

Also, Veriblock (https://www.veriblock.com/) production chain went live on March 26th. We discovered in last month post that large increase in transaction was due to Veriblock testing their own notarisation processes, now their business is in production we can expect a slow grinding up of their transactions, together with their business development. We'll keep an eye on this.


Bitcoin is working for what it was meant for by Satoshi: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Last month we analysed the case in Indonesia: volumes exploded on the back of government providing legislative framework to Bitcoin users: volumes exploded, but slowly reverted toward usual levels (even if they still are notably higher than averages).

More interesting is what happened in the South American Scenario: bitcoin as uncensorable store of value in now derailed South American regimens.

Let's have a look at Venezuelan Volumes (I will provide absolute BTC volumes, as volumes in Bolivar are irrelevant due to the explosive inflation in the VES):

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobff0235ca3fb33acc.jpeg

We can observe the transaction volume is quite elevated, even if we notice  a few dips in the transaction volumes: this were cause d by extensive blackout all over the country. Surprise! Bitcoin can thrive also on stranded environments, demonstrating quite a lot of resilience on electricity scarcity, when compared to other payments system. I wrote a short post  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg50116818#msg50116818)on the subject a few weeks ago. Food for though.

Don't forget that Bitcoin was created in part as a response to the banking crisis of 2008 ("The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks' is engraved forever on the first block) and the next major crisis will be the first during Bitcoin's existence. Already it's happening in Venezuela, Turkey might be the next, or EC, or who knows where de spiralling debt can get the US (they won't default, as Alan Greenspan wittingly pointed out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck3FuTzZvhI), but that doesn't mean that there won't be consequences).

Anyway if Bitcoin is working as Satoshi intended, or Bitcoin is working as Satoshi didn’t intend, then the common finding is that Bitcoin is working!
 
Source: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES


Unique addresses number is not picking up: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: unique addresses is a loose measure of users in the ecosystem. True, many users could share the same address (like exchange addresses used by many users) or vice-versa each user could have many addresses (think about someone trying to entangle his addresses in order to gain some degrees of privacy).
Addresses numbers are also used in some kind of Bitcoin valuations involving Metcalfe’s law, or a law trying do determine the value of a network, users being the asset of such network.
 
COMMENT: Unique Bitcoin addresses used has shown some sign of bullish momentum during last month, but they are still at levels last associated with much lower prices. We are still below 500,000 and slightly lower than last month, not much.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf890d4e295eae361.jpeg

Source: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7

NVT:BEARISH
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Network Value to Transaction (NVT) is defined as the Bitcoin Network Value over the Daily Transaction Volume and be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found here:
https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/

COMMENT: NTV continued to slide down, but remain far-above the levels that have typically marked price bottoms (NTV Ratio above 40 signals a bottom on the market). As stated last month, we are looking to a repeat of 2015-2018 cycle, where both NTV and volatility were both indicating lower levels, so there’s still a  pressure and space for them to fall lower together.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf5aea0543432087a.jpeg

Realised Cap: BEARISH
Previous Month:BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: The realised cap attempts to improve the market cap by valuing different part of the Bitcoin supply at different prices , instead of using the daily close as market cap does: every coin, or more properly every UTXO is valued at the price of their creation. In a less technically correct explanation let’s say that  while Market Cap use the last traded price and multiplies it times by the coins in circulation, Realised Cap computes  the total value paid for each coin at the price they last moved on the blockchain

COMMENT: I do like this indicator not only because improve the market capitalisation, that is a very misleading indicator for crypto currencies, but also because it really grasps the “true hodling value” of Bitcoin. Imagine getting long at 100$, you probably still value your investment at that level. Of course you do MtM, but 100$ is probably a significative level that can be used by other to find significant price levels. I think, but I have to dig into it , that this indicator should be looked coupled with HODL Waves one.


MVRV: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE:  MVRV (Market Value to Realised Value Ratio) (https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-mvrv-ratio/) is an indicator was designed by David Puell and Murad Mahmudov and is simply the ratio of Market Cap / Realised Cap. It’s useful for getting a sense of when the exchange traded price is below “fair value” and is also quite useful for spotting market tops and bottoms. Refer to linked Woobull website for an in-depth explanation.
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob349ee7ace137404d.jpeg

Also this indicator is not so positive, as the relative strength of Market Cap to Realised Cap means the market is becoming more "expensive". We might see new low in the indicators, meaning locals minimum to buy.

Resources:
Realised Cap:
https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/
MVRV:
https://blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-market-value-to-realized-value-mvrv-ratio-3ebc914dbaee


USD Exchange Trade Volume: NEUTRAL
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

RATIONALE: Exchange traded futures are the closest instrument to Bitcoin Wall Street can touch to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. Provided the price will follow quite closely the Bitcoin price, or what can be observed in the relevant “walled gardens” used to settle the futures, what is interesting for us is the contract volumes, that can give us a few hints of the interest Wall Street has towards the digital gold.

COMMENT: big news in March was CBOT decision to delist future series of their Bitcoin futures. This move was widely expected as CBOT has been lagging behind CME in trading volumes with increasing underperformance in recent months:
 
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob755cbfd1e246d7d9.jpeg

CBOE Bitcoin futures daily contract trading volumes decreased from a daily average of 8.1 mios USD to 5.6 mios USD in February, while the opposite was noted on CME's, where the same metric increased from 79.9 mios USD in Jan. to 98.9 million USD in Feb. With CME volumes being an order of magnitude bigger than CBOT's made little sense going on quoting such instruments where competitive advantage resides almost entirely in market liquidity and depth. 

I wouldn't read too much in this decision about any lack of institutional interest, but implications are important regarding hopes of a Bitcoin Exchange Traded Product (ETF) diminished slightly as this decision do not to bode well with regulators who already questioned market liquidity: CBOE was set to be the listing exchange for the Vaneck SolidX Bitcoin Trust, who has consequently been delayed yet another time. Also Gemini is suffering, as CBOE was the elected venue to source daily settlement price.


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf84d556c257aabf4.jpeg

Exchange traded futures still represent a tiny fraction of total futures trading in Bitcoin: futures represent roughly 25% of trading in Bitcoin (75% being spot transactions), and only 5% of this 25% is traded on traditional exchange traded Futures. This data is constant since last month. (decentralised exchanges continue to represent only a tiny fraction of global spot volume, roughly 0.17%).


I think however they are relevant as traditional finance player cannot trade on BitMex or other futures platform. And I think the looming shock on the demand side of bitcoin (shock on the offer ha already been analysed on the halving section) is the firehouse on the liquidity of traditional investment waiting to be open on bitcoin (that’s also why the next step in Futures adoption, Bakkt, is so important). 

Last month's concerns about lack of volatility still hold true, in my opinion.

Cumulate short positions at Bitfinex stay at low levels, after having been punished during this month:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob6d294f4967ffac93.jpeg

Lack of short positions means either there aren't people looking to sell now, as BTC has likely bottomed up (bullish statement) but also means there's buy order ready to be fired when the down move begins (bearish argument). The choice is yours. 

Of course all of these considerations have to be weighted after the evidences of many exchanges rigging trading volumes, exposed by Bitwise in their very well documented report (https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca201901-5164833-183434.pdf). More on this report later, but we can say that if 95% of volumes are fake, then the relative weight of futures trading (not being faked) changes dramatically:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob53058ead67bf7eb7.jpeg.

Second implications of that study is the fact that now yet another time, digital Gold closely resembles physical gold:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobede1a28e63558a6d.jpeg.

This is a good sign of hope, and I am changing the sentiment index to Neutral.

CME future
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html
CBOE future
http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures


Bitwise Report: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term
RATIONALE: if you haven't been sleeping under a stone last month, you know that Bitwise presented a complete report on Bitcoin market status to the FED.
You can find the whole document (229 slides) here. (https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca201901-5164833-183434.pdf)

Rationale: This report is utterly important. First of all clearly demonstrate how many Tier2 exchanges basically rigged their volume statistics to attract investors. The conclusion is that almost 95% of daily Bitcoin Volumes are fake. Exposing the fraudulent techniques of second tier exchanges, the best practice implemented in first tier exchanges emerges: many of the best known exchanges are actually immune from this report, and thus have their reputation tightened.
I said many times exchanges are the weak link in the Bitcoin ecosystem: poor operations, subpar technologies, prone to frauds, scams and every kind of market rigging schemes (pump and dumps, market manipulations etc: basically every illicit operation banned in traditional financial markets since 20 years ago, to say the least).
Every month news report of lost founds, hacked accounts, founder's frauds.
Even to expert users is difficult to tell what is happening:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobff21f7c02c98c439.jpeg

the first thinking is once a lousy exchange's long term sophisticated scam scheme get spoiled by a report like Bitwise's, you revert to simple, quick run-away-with-the-funds scam, disguised ad KYC lock. (EDIT: eventually everything has been sorted out, so the scam insinuations are not founded, this time).

Second result of this report is doing some sound and clear statements about some major and very well radicated misconceptions about some negatively perceived aspects related to bitcoin: liquidity, transparency, custody issues, revealing the truth is far less worrying than what the regulators or general public perceive.

So, again, every step taken in separating genuine operators from scammers, top quality counterpart from low quality piggy riders, truth from misconceptions, goes in the right direction making Bitcoin more and more viable for general public.

After the first we of this post came out this news:
Crypto Exchange Bithumb Hacked for $13 Million in Suspected Insider Job (https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchange-bithumb-hacked-for-13-million-in-suspected-insider-job?hootPostID=5070c656b662296507d5a7520a23ce6e)
Dear Lord, the did it again. They've been hacked in the past, they got hacked again, from an insider (I still cannot decide if it worst to be hacked by outside, or be hacked by someone you deliberately chose to work with): anyway the tale of the story is always the same: don't keep your funds on any exchanges, and be happy when some exchange gets hacked, because it's like a Darwin race to a modern Exchange ecosystem.

HODL Waves: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

RATIONALE: Bitcoin HODL Waves is a visualisation by Unchained Capital (https://blog.unchained-capital.com/bitcoin-data-science-pt-1-hodl-waves-7f3501d53f63), it shows the cross section of Bitcoin held in wallets grouped by the age since they last moved. The upper contours, represent supply (old coins that have remained unmoved) while the lower contours represent new demand (coins that have recently shifted). The composite view clearly shows each bull cycle bringing in new demand. This visualisation is useful for locating exactly where the market timing is during its long term oscillations between bull and bear phases.
TL,DR: The area Above each line is the amount of "coins" not moved since the relevant time horizon.

COMMENT: Most lines are downward trending (look particularly at 12m brown line). This means coins are being HODLED: coins have been pulled from exchanges (trading activity is mostly off-chain and not relevant for this graph) and kept on wallets. This means strong hands are building a wall for future up-movements.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob42811fb9302b2308.jpeg


Additional interesting resources:

A collection of very useful Bitcoin valuation tools (https://www.kanaandkatana.com/valuation-depot)
Top Cap and Delta Cap: New Metrics for Spotting Bitcoin Price Trend Reversals (https://www.coindesk.com/top-cap-and-delta-cap-new-metrics-for-spotting-bitcoin-price-trend-reversals)
 VIDEO: How Lightning Makes Bitcoin Great Again (For Payments) - Alex Bosworth | CoinDesk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wApScWAA6gQ&feature=youtu.be)

I would like to thanks all who contributed to this post, in particular Plutosky and Neo_Coin from the “Bitcoin Pump!” thread on the Italian board for invaluable exchange of ideas and help in keeping track of news, Suchmoon for a few suggestions as well as the whole WO's family for moral support and entertainment.

What are your thoughts?

I hope this new price change will not be like before, we know that the price has risen to $4100 several times, but then it falls back, maybe because there are too many people selling. I hope the price can break above $4500, it will be a new record this year

Excellent analysis and alignment, nothing more to add.
My opinion is that the bottom we have not yet felt, but for now for the bears, just because we have to go below $ 3000 for bitcoin.
But then we will return to the upward channel again because halving in 2020 will give bitcoin even more growth than in 2017.

I also believe in the analysis Op made and edited for march. I think that we are gradually creeping into bull but I hope it continues this move. We have actually seen much of bottom and price dragging between $3700/$3950, let's have some fresh air  ;D

Another most excellent report sir. In depth enough to be engaging but not so technical as to scare away potential new readership. If I could add one small critique that would be that the entire report is homogenized to some extent. Meaning you have no place for a reader to take a small breather between the onslaught of data you are projecting at them.

Even a small break line such as this.

----

Like I try and do over at the Wall gives the reader a sense of completion and that they are moving into a new area of thought.

____

It could be a solid or broken line long or short...or even just(more)space between paragraphs. Also naming each segment or chapter is helpful as well. ymmv.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway...I like it. Thanks.

+1 WOsMerit

Duly noted. I’ll figure out something for next month.

In summary to all your explanations I think we are heading in a bullish season and I base my arguments on the constant reduction of bitcoin and also with the upcoming bitcoin halving that would take place in May 2020. I strongly believe bitcoin will see a rise in the nearest future and we can achieve an all time high again. Bearish and Bullish seasons are cyclical and I think we have been in the bearish season for a while now, time to see bitcoin bull run.

@fillippone

great analysis :) i dont understand all graphs or all numbers, but is precius work anyway

Previous updates:

January OP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)
February Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)
March Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

Halving: BULLISH
Last Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium

Rationale: Yes, for the third fourth time in a row this is the first reason why I am bullish on Bitcoin.
This month I am again twisting the stock to flow rationale with yet another great tweet  (https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/1120265384932859904) by PlanB (Twitter: https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4v7bflX4AE96Yw.png:large




https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4yecWEXkAAUw6R.jpg

This model has worked since 2009 and accurately predicted bitcoin value using only data from 2009-2012  (https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/1117019829607833600)(note, even before the first halving!), and is of course pointing to a theoretical "fair" value. Deviation from this value can be quite massive, due to "irrational" market swings, but here you get the picture (pun intended):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4wCXKlX4AEebAs.png


And yes, I do like Plan B a lot, you'll hear more from him in the future.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

Layer 2 applications - Lightning Network: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralised, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers adding robustness and immutability to the protocol itself (immutability of a protocol should be considered a feature, not a bug. Research the DAO disaster for an example).

Comment: Suddenly, Lightning Network halted his massive growth last month. All metrics are almost unchanged MoM, almost a first after months of exponential growth. This flatness is quite unusual.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf7e8a36837a5bb90.jpeg

here you have the LN network capacity trend over the last 6 months: flat at the top!

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob6a729140f76d0ccf.jpeg

is this worrying? I think it is not, as capacity is of course an important parameter, but not the only one to focus on. Regarding LN I spoke last month about usability, and for sure one big step ahead toward wider adoption has been done this month with the first complete LN desktop application by Lightning Labs (https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-labs-launches-desktop-app-on-bitcoin-mainnet), one of the team implementing LN protocols, providing users with a simplified and effective environment to operate their LN node.

On  a separate note HodlHodl, a P2P exchange, declared it's going to accept Lightning payments (https://medium.com/@hodlhodl/hodl-hodl-announces-lightning-support-42cead7e4d5f) enabling users to buy and sell BTC directly from their LN Wallets.

On a broader view we have to remember that LN is only the first experiment of Layer 2 protocol: not only once you have built the L2 this paves the way to L3 or even L4 we cannot even think about, but also other L2 applications are possible, with all the subsequent permutation made available:

On this topic i can suggest you to read a good medium article: Lightning is Only the Beginning: The Emerging Bitcoin Stack (https://medium.com/blockchain-capital-blog/lightning-is-only-the-beginning-the-emerging-bitcoin-stack-fb6d4aefb664)

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*shX6_sAk4RHcQ9VX_ivpPw.png

Important corollary: the more layers you build on the BTC protocol, the more you “compress” it and the more you get it immutable: protocol immutability is a feature, not a bug. This is the Jenga principle firstly stated by  @giacomozucco.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg


Transactions number: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Short Term
 
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

Rationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalisation, transaction number cannot be discarded.

Comment: During last month price has been moving right, so has been the transaction number. Transaction number is in the high “recent range” and on various days broke the 400k daily confirmed transactions, the highest levels since November 2017.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/bloba4429af8f872bf39.jpeg

Notably something moved also in the mempool, where there were some kind of actions after months of empty mempool.

Two phenomenon are to highlight on this number of transaction.
First is the impact of launch of Veribock, we have been talking in the past months'report: they are using (spamming, according to some less benevolent interpretation) Bitcoin network for their own purposes, but the impact, hasn't been analytically determined recently, so claim of 30% transaction claim are unfounded, albeit made by well known Bitcoin Maximalists (https://coingape.com/charlie-lee-spagni-samson-mow-bitcoin-alarming/).
Second is a slight improvement in transactions due to the increased popularity of Coinjoins. This is an interesting trend, that can be analysed in this nice report: CoinJoins as a Percentage of All Bitcoin Payments Have Tripled to 4.09% Over the Past Year (https://www.longhash.com/news/coinjoins-as-a-percentage-of-all-bitcoin-payments-have-tripled-to-409-over-the-past-year)

Tipping to bullish?


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg


Bitcoin is working for what it was meant for by Satoshi: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Last month we analysed the case in Indonesia: volumes exploded on the back of government providing legislative framework to Bitcoin users: volumes exploded, but slowly reverted toward usual levels (even if they still are notably higher than averages).

More interesting is what happened in the South American Scenario: bitcoin as uncensorable store of value in now derailed South American regimens.

Let's have a look at Argentinian Volumes (BTC volumes, as volumes in ARS are irrelevant due to the explosive inflation):

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob28c99e112d880851.jpeg

We can observe the transaction volume is somewhat elevated, and people keep buying Bitcoins to preserve value in an high inflation environment.

Well, but Argentina is a borderline defaulted country: we live in first world, inflation immune countries aren't we? Well, brace yourself:


IMF's Lagarde Laments "Highly Mysterious" Low Inflation, Says "Everybody" Would Like It To Be Higher (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-29/imfs-lagarde-laments-highly-mysterious-low-inflation-says-everybody-would-it-be)

Anyway if Bitcoin is working as Satoshi intended, or Bitcoin is working as Satoshi didn’t intend, then the common finding is that Bitcoin is working!


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

Unique addresses number is not picking up: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: unique addresses is a loose measure of users in the ecosystem. True, many users could share the same address (like exchange addresses used by many users) or vice-versa each user could have many addresses (think about someone trying to entangle his addresses in order to gain some degrees of privacy).
Addresses numbers are also used in some kind of Bitcoin valuations involving Metcalfe’s law, or a law trying do determine the value of a network, users being the asset of such network.
 
COMMENT: Unique Bitcoin addresses moved sideways during last month, but they are still at levels last associated with much lower prices. We are still around 500,000 and slightly lower than last month, not much. Thinking of deleting this indicator next month if anything materialise.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe232f88683b71873.jpeg


Source: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

NVT:BEARISH
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Network Value to Transaction (NVT) is defined as the Bitcoin Network Value over the Daily Transaction Volume and be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found in the resource links at the end of the post.


COMMENT: NTV continued to slide down, but remain far-above the levels that have typically marked price bottoms (NTV Ratio above 40 signals a bottom on the market). As stated last month, we are looking to a repeat of 2015-2018 cycle, and the ratio graph reported below outlines again striking resemblances at fractal levels: the blip in the quicker NTVR 140 cannot rule out another downward leg to 4K.


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5P90qpUwAYOWPP.jpg:large


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

Realised Cap: NEUTRAL
Previous Month:BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: The realised cap attempts to improve the market cap by valuing different part of the Bitcoin supply at different prices , instead of using the daily close as market cap does: every coin, or more properly every UTXO is valued at the price of their creation. In a less technically correct explanation let’s say that  while Market Cap use the last traded price and multiplies it times by the coins in circulation, Realised Cap computes  the total value paid for each coin at the price they last moved on the blockchain .You can look at this indicator as an improvement to the market capitalisation, a very misleading indicator for crypto currencies, trying to capture the “true hodling value” of Bitcoin.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob0bb60a226993e3c8.png


COMMENT: During last month, price suddenly moved above realised cap, that is still pointing south. If crossing a mean is a positive sign, then crossing realised cap cannot be negative. Slight upgrade to neutral.


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg


MVRV: NEUTRAL
Previous month: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE:  MVRV (Market Value to Realised Value Ratio) (https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-mvrv-ratio/) is an indicator was designed by David Puell and Murad Mahmudov and is simply the ratio of Market Cap / Realised Cap. It’s useful for getting a sense of when the exchange traded price is below “fair value” and is also quite useful for spotting market tops and bottoms. Refer to linked Woobull website for an in-depth explanation.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob0949515f396c4e62.png

COMMENT: Market price movement last month, made this indicator snapping back to mean levels above 1 (undervaluation threshold) back to 1.25, so bearishness has been removed. Little tilting to the upside also here.


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

USD Exchange Trade Volume: NEUTRAL
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

RATIONALE: Exchange traded futures are the closest instrument to Bitcoin Wall Street can touch to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. Provided the price will follow quite closely the Bitcoin price, or what can be observed in the relevant “walled gardens” used to settle the futures, what is interesting for us is the contract volumes, that can give us a few hints of the interest Wall Street has towards the digital gold.

COMMENT: Exchange traded volumes took a pause after last month increase returning to more usual levels:
 
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob5e63ba74cde8cb44.jpeg

Spot volumes increased sharply 47%, from 220 billion USD in February to 325 billion USD in march.
Meanwhile, futures volumes from bitFlyer Lighting and BitMEX combined around the 50 billions mark similarly to the previous month.
These volumes should be reliable and not impacted by fake figures.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobd59533af9e2a9f7f.jpeg

CME’s bitcoin futures product volumes decreased from 98.9 million USD to 70.5 million USD (-29%) in March. Meanwhile, CBOE’s bitcoin futures volume decreased from 5.6 million USD to 4.7 million USD (15.9%) as they have chosen to cease listing additional bitcoin futures
products in the near future.
Grayscale’s bitcoin trust product (GBTC), which is traded on the OTC markets also decreased in terms of average trading volume in March to 8.76 million USD.


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobd59533af9e2a9f7f.jpeg



Exchange traded futures still represent a tiny fraction of total futures trading in Bitcoin: futures represent roughly 25% of trading in Bitcoin (75% being spot transactions), and only 5% of this 25% is traded on traditional exchange traded Futures. This data is constant since last month.

DEXs represent only a small fraction of global spot exchange volume (0.14%, without a clear trend over last months), trading a
monthly total of 447 million USD in March.

An important limit is that on these exchanges it's not possible to trade stablecoins, that represent the 80% of spot volumes:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob18b03498924da366.jpeg

I would expect a brilliant future for DEx's, but this requires few technological advances to get traction on liquidity, necessary to have a positive reinforcement in traded volumes, a condition necessary for this kind of exchange to thrive. It's important to note that also traditional exchanges see the DEX's not as competitors, but another way to increase revenues: Binance Launches Decentralized Exchange Ahead of Schedule (https://www.coindesk.com/binance-launches-decentralized-exchange-ahead-of-schedule), or the aforementioned news of HodlHodl accepting Lightning payments (https://medium.com/@hodlhodl/hodl-hodl-announces-lightning-support-42cead7e4d5f).


Cumulate short positions at Bitfinex shoot on the upside: those guys want to get rekkt.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob48b464fb4a7d05d7.jpeg

I have no evidences, but I feel this increase being related to the Tether FUD, but I strongly disagree with that trading logic: or you get the trading timing exactly right or it is recipe for disaster.


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg


Bitwise Report Exchange Scrutiny: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term
Previous month Status: BULLISH
Rationale: exchanges are the weak link in the Bitcoin ecosystem: poor operations, subpar technologies, prone to frauds, scams and every kind of market rigging schemes (pump and dumps, market manipulations etc: basically every illicit operation banned in traditional financial markets since 20 years ago, to say the least). Every month news report of lost founds, hacked accounts, founder's frauds. Every news is a Darwin's push for the Bitcoin ecosystem toward a more efficient functioning.

As I expected, Bitwise report (https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca201901-5164833-183434.pdf) started a flurry scrutiny about Exchanges volumes and procedures.
Some exchanges, like TRT (https://www.therocktrading.com/), demonstrated good practices (https://dgi.io/2019/04/23/TRT-Volumes.html), other failed.
There was a lot of new websites trying to "clean" rigged Volumes statistics presented from CMC (that also took some steps towards accurately reporting volumes.

A few example of such sites are:

• https://www.cryptocompare.com
  
• https://www.coingecko.com/en
  
• https://openmarketcap.com/
  
• https://coincheckup.com
  
• https://messari.io/onchainfx
  

Bitfinex/Tether underlying issue was not they were printing money, that was FUD, or easy reading of the situation.  The point is that their operations had to resort to questionable fiat payment processors. This has been a problem for Bitcoin companies since a long time. And as usual this also demonstrate why personal financial sovereignty matters: CB or regulators can build trenches around bitcoin operators cutting their access to interchange with FIAT money system. With decentralised, or non-custodial, exchanges or with hyperbitcoinisation this problem is going to matter less and less, but of course it is relevant in the meantime. Exchange should do something in providing more transparency on their asset holding, maybe via a cryptographically proving their solvency as suggested by Caitling Long (https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1121568982580985856)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob4a5e193a8983ebff.png



https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/cryptocapital-co-may-be-cryptos-black-swan/


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

HODL Waves: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term
Previous month Status: BULLISH

RATIONALE: Bitcoin HODL Waves is a visualisation by Unchained Capital (https://blog.unchained-capital.com/bitcoin-data-science-pt-1-hodl-waves-7f3501d53f63), it shows the cross section of Bitcoin held in wallets grouped by the age since they last moved. The upper contours, represent supply (old coins that have remained unmoved) while the lower contours represent new demand (coins that have recently shifted). The composite view clearly shows each bull cycle bringing in new demand. This visualisation is useful for locating exactly where the market timing is during its long term oscillations between bull and bear phases.
TL,DR: The area Above each line is the amount of "coins" not moved since the relevant time horizon.

COMMENT: The chart looks almost identical to last month's with all lines pointing south: this means that recent price movement, or news (I am thinking about the Bitfinex one, above all) didn't impact HODLING schemes too much. We are still HODLIng strong!

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7bd29ef669c7b968.png


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg


A few interesting reports:

• Circle Research 1Q19 (http://research.circle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Circle-Research-1Q19-Retrospective-1.pdf)
  
• Market Surveillance Report BTI institute (https://www.bti.live/reports-april2019/)
  
• Bitcoin Heavy Accumulation Adamant Capital   (https://docsend.com/view/jwr8qwx)
  

Bitcoin Models reference list:

• Introducing NVT Ratio (Bitcoin's PE Ratio), use it to detect bubbles (https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/)
  
• When did Bitcoin's investment era begin? A study using NVT. (https://woobull.com/bitcoins-early-investment-era-under-nvt-ratio/)
  
• Realised Cap (https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/)
  
• MVRV (https://blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-market-value-to-realized-value-mvrv-ratio-3ebc914dbaee)
  

• CME future (https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html)
  

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

Bonus Section:
BEST Tweet of the month:

howmanyconfs.com
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob895b391f816ccce9.jpeg

howmanyconfs.com (http://howmanyconfs.com)
How many confirmations are equivalent to 6 Bitcoin confirmations?

If for some strange reason the catchphrase "thermodynamic security" might not be immediately clear to you, all the detailed calculations can be found here (https://github.com/lukechilds/howmanyconfs.com/blob/master/README.md#how-are-these-values-calculated)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe40d697ac3256896.jpeg

I would like to thanks all who contributed to this post, in particular the guys in the “Bitcoin Pump!” thread on the Italian board for invaluable exchange of ideas and help in keeping track of news, for a few suggestions as well as the whole WO's family for moral support and entertainment.

What are your thoughts?
Time to update the format a little bit?
[/list]

The reason transactions are not picking up (when you take out the orgs that are using the network to test/spam) is because in the Dec 2017 - Feb 2018 period, when fees spiked, bitcoin lost some users permanently.

Some of the remittance operators switched to Stellar Lumens/Bitshares/Dash as they were more reliable. It was either do that or wind up their business because none of their users could afford $1000 fees.

Lots of the altcoin mining pools switched to paying by Litecoin or Ethereum. Lots or ordinary users switched to moving stuff from exchange to exchange via an alt (litecoin, Ether, BCH or doge).

Once these people switch to another method of moving money, they never switch back. Instead they stick with the new method for as long as it continues to works.

When fees spiked again at the start of April 2019, we had a new batch of people switching to alts to move money.

Basically everytime the fees spike a new group of people are alienated and their transactions move onto a different chain for good. Eventually this will happen once too often and an alt will become the primary way of moving things. Lots of people already use ethereum, litecoin, doge and BCH in that way.

Your point is interesting.
All those operators should take care when switching to alts to transfer value reason is in the BONUS section of my post.
Fees are not a bug, but the price to have an uncensorable transactions. Other alt offer cheaper fees, but at a cost of very limited security.

Your bonus section refers to Bitcoin's forks, which I agree are not very good - but they're not bitcoin's primary competition.

Unique alts like Ethereum, Dash and others are the main competition.

There was a video circulating like mad on reddit of someone from Venezuela purchasing food with crypto:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/bi9hdg/what_crypto_looks_like_to_people_who_needs_it_the/

2760 upvotes because people were excited about ADOPTION.

But when you view the video the Venezuelan was using Ethereum. Adoption is not happening with bitcoin, it's happening with Ether. That's why the Ether transaction count is so high.

Run your analysis again, but this time comparing each point with Ether to see which coin is outperforming.

BTW, I don't own any Ether, but am thinking of buying now the price is reasonable.

If you follow the link you’ll see also ETH and all major alts are considered.

Well believe we are pointing more in the bullish direction especially with the upcoming bitcoin halving which would reduce the block rewards hence the daily amount of bitcoin being generated daily. This would definitely bring about an increase in price and also the further development of ligtining network which seeks to increase the transaction speed of bitcoin.

All these factors to me are pointing in the right direction of a bull run soon. For those who think we are still going to hit the bottom, they should just watch bitcoin rise in no time. Holding some bitcoins at the moment and waiting for the bull market at any point in time.

For me the bearish market company to happen because we all know the increment will not been happened till now and we cannot be any type of income through this development so I need to wait for sometime for getting good development then only I say the bull market will come.

I do not sure about this because in my mind lots of confusion still going on and I don't have the hundred percent result of improvement when I see in the current situation of your market the solution will come only through the changes happening so I am waiting to see the changes then only decision made by me will be clear.

^^^^ x2 Boy, I hate signature campaigns.

Yes, they were also considered. April is over, and we see that it managed to bring positive changes to many cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. I think it was bullish this month, surely.

Excellent analysis as always Filippone; now more and more the bullish rather than the bearish sentiment prevails, and also several graphical indicators seem to turn positive, but nevertheless I believe that we still have to witness a last big downward leg before a real and healthy restart.

We will see the real point towards the end of the year and the beginning of 2020, with the approach of the 3 halving, where a price recovery will necessarily be required.

Yes, the sentiment is slowly turning bullish again, and halving is going to play a mayor role this time.
This is why i am reading my reports: to keep track of how things are evolving on the medium/long term and don't get lost in the daily trading noise.

For the month of May and upcoming ones, I think Bitcoin already gave us a green signal that we are heading towards a parabolic bullish momentum after closing above $5350 (specifically the $5000 mark).

Here are 2 of the biggest bullish news I've got to share:

US Income Tax Payers Can Now Get Refunds in Bitcoin
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/us-income-tax-payers-can-now-get-refunds-in-bitcoin

20% of 18-34 Year Olds in America 'Own Bitcoin,' Recent Survey Reveals
Source: https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2019/05/20-of-americans-age-between-18-34-own-bitcoin-recent-survey-reveals/

Watching all these, I don't think that an argument like "we still need mainstream adoption" is gonna work as we are already seeing adoption coming in.

The lower transaction volume and less new address creations that you gave as a possible reason for BTC to remain bearish can be due to OTC trades that are buying BTC in bulk and getting the steam out of the markets before a big parabolic rise nobody may have thought of.

April was a good month for bitcoin and slowly its trend converting into bullish zone and it was above 5000$ and now a new month is start and we can see it above 6000$ mark before this month end. It complete its bearish cycle now after one year of down trend.

People who has been waiting for BTC to go bearish again has been doing so for a long term and yet they are not getting their request, recently that the price of bitcoin dropped to about $5100, many these losers  still speculated that the price is falling to $4500, thinking many people will panic and sell for their unrealistic prediction to become realistic, but bitcoin has turned around to start increasing again, this shoes that the present BULL is the market holds a very strong position to sustain the price of BTC above $5000 and I think from this point is when it will continue to grow till we hit the bull run.

Seems we have some bulls that are beginning to make very 1st of each month now their investment day LOL. Bitcoin reduced in it value prior to the first of this month but I can see now that since we crossed over to the new month, the price has been improving again.

My own expectation is Starting from June, that is when I expect Bitcoin to fully be domiciled in the Bullish market, that is the time we will get to $6000, and the moment we see that price, I think it will be the main mark for the beginning of the bull run, if we can get to $6000 by June, then there will be nothing stopping BTC from reaching $10,000 by the end of this year.

I agree with you this April price of bitcoin has touched almost 5k dollar which is on the way still there are some investors who are investing so price is rising more and more, till April 2020 I am sure market will be more than 15k solar so wait for your time, April has stated to increase the price and this process will continue now.

The situation of April cannot be associated with bullish yet, because it still cannot sustain a gradual price increase as bearish randomly reinstated further. April days was too tricky and unpredictable, but I do hope this May was a good market to come for all of us. Don't expect bullish market yet, just be calm and enjoy what's the actual trend may bring in the next few days as we're going to recover little by little.

For me April is the month that started it all, the $100 million investment of entity after April fools push the price of bitcoin and now its like $1500 increased after that. So we can really associate April with bullish sentiments already. And as far as the downtrend we've seen, its because of the Tether and Bitfinex, if not for that bad timing, we may probably see the price going into $6k today. But there could be some pullback, but it's healthy so that we can invest again.

Bull markets are surely rising as we have seen high growth even today and in the coming months we can see more and more peoples investing into cryptocurrencies. This is turning a good source of investment for even those peoples who are not that into the field of cryptocurrencies so the number of investors is in the ascending manner which also makes the investors invest into coins which are most popular like ETH, Ripple, etc.

The markets have started growing and we can at least see bitcoins crossing $15k by the end of this year. The amount may increase as per the new investors getting into the field. What it think, is that also the community from the stock exchanges should invest into cryptocurencies which will surely make the volume much more higher.

Huge number of big whales are always looking for most of the peoples o panic sell their coins which will create a perfect dip to but any of the coin and at that time those big whales can buy most of the coins to hold until the price rises above.

It is our role not to listen over to such rumors and to keep holding our coins even in the situation of panic because the cryptocurrency markets would surely show us huge growth in the coming markets considering the ever rising demand for them.

Price for bitcoins have now crossed $5600 so we can now expect a higher price to be reached by the end of this month. Bull run is on the way and most of the peoples including me were been waiting for these bullish markets to arrive.

As usual no one is able to tell when the price of BTC is going up to down,  we can't really tell which one it is going to be. All we can do is just to guess where it is likely to go and it's then we decide whether we are to take those risk, cause you're either going to lose of it doesn't go as the bullish prediction, but if it does then you're going to make a lot of profit. A lot of people have been saying that the halving next year is going to lead to a bull run, but how sure are we about that? Nobody really knows if it is true or not.

Should I join you guys in believing this also, because it seems real to me the way bitcoin has been moving, from$5100 in the beginning of this month to almost $5900 now within 3 days, same pattern that we saw last month, hmmm, let me not get my hopes too high yet, bitcoin is not joking at all, it seems it is beginning to go against every FUD news.

Look at recently that tether news almost created panic on the heart of many investors, thank God we have more believers of the coin has investors, if it was other coins, I am sure by now, we would have been seeing $2000 LOL. Now every doubting Thomas can see that we are now fully our of the bear market.

The more I read your comment guys, the more I think signature campaign requiring a certain number of post per week are the absolute evil of the forum.
 I would like to merit some of the message you posted on the thread, if only they had some kind of meaning and weren’t absolutely similar to message composed of autocomplete suggested words.

April was the bullish month for the bitcoin only.  It was indeed a worst month for altcoins as we see most of the altcoins went below their all time low value. No news or event like main net , listing could pump the altcoins for long time duration. Ask from the holders of altcoins and they will say that their portfolio are at extreme losses.

If it happens, most of the guys will be as happy as never. I have heard some predictions that Bitcoin will be even more expensive than in 2017 this year, but I do not really think so.

It has been just like that since last month (April) the price keeps on going up. Lately I thought it was going down when it reduced to $5,300 but before I could know what was happening, this  morning the price was already on its way up and has gotten to $5600 and this evening when I checked back it was close to $5,800 ($5,778 or so).

Every month it moves to another level, if it continues like this, then we might see the price move up above $10,000 each for btc. I always have this halving in mind, don't really know how it's going to be when that time reach.

Everything is all speculation upon speculation, we cannot really know the exact direction the crypto value will go and I see most of these figures as guessing work, at least by the time we guess all the possible numbers, one of them must become reality no matter the time it takes.

The only way we can come a little close to getting our speculations right is when we follow the markets news closely, if we don’t miss any of the news, we will be able to truly predict the direction Bitcoin will take on a daily basis because fundamental analysis really do have a very big impact on the value of the coin we are holding.

Previous updates
January OP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)
February Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)
March Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)
April Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50841890#msg50841890)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Halving: BULLISH
Last Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium

Rationale: Yes, if you read me in the past months you know this is the main reason I am bullish on bitcoin.
I was bullish for the halving even before getting in contact with  PlanB (Twitter: https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD), but he then more rigorously formalised what I had as a gut- feeling.
This month I am posting a scenario that could break the halvening cycles we have observed in the past.
What if the more mainstream adoption and the presence of more "institutional money", more keen to "efficient markets" (à la Fama) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis) drives up the markets in anticipations of the halving and the subsequent stock to flow reduction?

Plan B added a few details on his explanation of the halvening effect follows a Power law in this this tweet  (https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/1133388321563062275):

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobff161cf91cb8464b.png


Well, what if market is already starting to price the effect of this halving before actually happening instead of following this?


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7bPmOgXoAEh5HY.png

Link to Tweet (https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/1132321276817752064)

I don't like to comment too much in the current price of BTC, but the sentiment is turning more and more bullish, and I think this kind of analysis is perfectly consistent with an anticipation of the halvening.  Price used to rise sharply after the halvening, reacting to this and not actually anticipating it. What if this time is different?
Market doesn't like discontinuities, and so tends to anticipate drastic moves or changes in the protocol.
If had could move a critic to Satoshi for his whitepaper, I would say the choice of discrete halvening is not optimal, while a more smooth reduction of coinbase would have been better implementation. (While researching for this, I stumbled on this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4r56xo/why_is_the_halving_once_every_4_years_and_not/), worth a read if interested).


Please note also that S2F multiple (https://www.tradingview.com/script/ysct73Zp-Bitcoin-Stock-to-Flow-Multiple-fixed/) is now available as an indicator in Tradingview.

A confirmation on how the halvening is going to impact bitcoin price development has emerged from Square quarterly results: Jack Dorsey's app has seen incredible growth in bitcoin selling activity, and if this is deemed to continue, impact on daily mined bitcoins could be substantial (https://www.longhash.com/news/why-jack-dorseys-square-is-so-important-for-bitcoin):


Similar conclusion came from the analysis of the GrayScale Bitcoin Trust (https://usethebitcoin.com/grayscale-bitcoin-trust-accumulates-11236-bitcoin-in-april-alone-how-can-this-affect-bitcoins-price/), that bought more than 11,236 BTC in April alone.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Layer 2 applications: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: Bitcoin has a low throughput for his on-chain transaction. Corollary of this Bitcoin protocol feature, is that not every transaction need the level of security guaranteed by an on-chain transaction. So we are building other solutions on the base of Bitcoin Protocol, known as Layer 2 solutions.
This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralized, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers adding robustness and immutability to the protocol itself (immutability of a protocol should be considered a feature, not a bug. Research the DAO disaster for an example).

Comment: Lightning Network halted his massive growth  and is now flat for the second month, metrics are almost unchanged MoM:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobb1a5a6c9758d9052.jpeg

LN network capacity trend over the last 6 months: flat at the top continues!

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob0b3ddc0d3ded2a15.jpeg

as I said last month capacity is of course an important parameter, but not the only one to focus on, but there are other important factors to consider. Usability and broad user experience is one of the most important now and we saw various improvements on the software itself (https://twitter.com/roasbeef/status/1126645742708203521) and third party support (https://medium.com/muunwallet/lightning-payments-easier-than-ever-dd211eb3c481).

HodlHodl, a P2P exchange, went on with Lightning adoption and went live with Lightning payments on their Testnet (https://medium.com/@hodlhodl/lightning-powered-trades-available-on-testnet-184c1b725402) enabling users to buy and sell BTC directly from their LN Wallets.

Ln is the first L2 solution, but other L" options are starting to take shape: as I said last month we can expect a multitude of such solution, that in their turn can be base of higher levels.

Some other L2 solution are taking shape:

• Microsoft Launches Decentralized Identity Tool on Bitcoin Blockchain (https://www.coindesk.com/microsoft-launches-decentralized-identity-tool-on-bitcoin-blockchain)
  
  Quote
  Microsoft is launching the first decentralized infrastructure implementation by a major tech company that is built directly on the bitcoin blockchain. The open source project, called Ion, deals with the underlying mechanics of how networks talk to each other. For example, if you log onto Airbnb using Facebook, a protocol deals with the software that sends the personal information from your social profile to that external service provider. In this case, Ion handles the decentralized identifiers, which control the ability to prove you own the keys to this data.
  
  This is indeed a very interesting L2 application, as it has a non monetary nature.
  

Also we see the beginning of Layer3 solutions, albeit in a very embryonal stage:

• if we think at the Liquid sidechain as a L2 solution: Blockstream Releases First Enterprise-Grade Product on Liquid (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/blockstream-releases-first-enterprise-grade-product-liquid/)
  
  Quote
  Security tokens are coming to Bitcoin, courtesy of Blockstream.
  The Bitcoin and blockchain technology company announced on May 15, 2019, the final day of the Consensus 2019 conference, that Liquid Securities, a platform for issuing and managing security tokens on its Liquid sidechain, is ready to go live. This platform will provide Liquid and its users with its first product to issue digital assets, a foundational milestone for bringing tokenization to the Bitcoin network.
  
  
  
• RIF Labs Launches 3rd-Layer Scalability Solution Capable of Processing Up to 5K TPS (https://cointelegraph.com/news/rif-labs-launches-3rd-layer-scalability-solution-capable-of-processing-up-to-5k-tps)
  
  Quote
  “Essentially Rootstock aims to be what Ethereum is, a decentralized, Turing-complete smart contract platform. However, Rootstock aims to utilize the Bitcoin ecosystem rather than creating a new one from scratch.”
  

This is only the beginning.

There was also some FUD spread this month about a LN node being to be considered a money transfer service, hence requiring a full licence. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7wxghy/psa_lightning_is_not_an_iou_or_a_bank/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) Of course this was quickly dismantled as ..FUD.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Transactions number: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Short Term
 
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

Rationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalization, transaction number cannot be discarded.

Comment: Despite dramatic rise in BTC price during last month, transaction number has remained quite flat. Transaction number is in the high “recent range” and on various days broke the 400k daily confirmed transactions, the highest levels since November 2017, but failed breaking higher, following price.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob079a34d7437fed6d.jpeg

Notably something moved also in the mempool, where there were some kind of actions after months of empty mempool, nothing too spectacular, probably some users still pay more fees than required.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobac39c4c463d064e8.jpeg


This lack of fees could be worrisome for someone thinking about the miners after the halving: if block reward is halvening, miners must rely on fees to commit themselves to blockchain validation. The reality is that Bitcoin is scaling without impacting on the daily paid fees, and despite this Bitcoin Miners Are Currently Earning 8x More in Fees Than All Other Cryptocurrencies Combined. (https://www.longhash.com/news/bitcoin-miners-are-currently-earning-8x-more-in-fees-than-all-other-cryptocurrencies-combined)

As we said last month, the impact of Veriblock OP_Returns transactions and CoinJoin transactions is yet to be fully assessed. Time will tell if those two development are going to significantly impact on transactions number.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Bitcoin is working for what it was meant for by Satoshi: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: Bitcoin is digital gold. This means that can serve an uncensorable store of value in now derailed regimes. As more and more government indulges in hopeless funding/money printing options, in many cases BTC is the only way to preserve the right to defend your own wealth against (hyper)inflation

Last  month we looked at Argentinian Volumes this month we look at Colombian Peso (we are looking at BTC volumes, as volumes in Pesos are irrelevant due to the inflation):

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob3a26812326b69b0f.jpeg

same is happening in Argentina, Peru, Tanzania, Kazakhstan and many more other countries all over the World (https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-price-rockets-all-time-highs-countries-crippling-fiat).

We can observe the transaction volume is somewhat elevated, and people keep buying Bitcoins to preserve value in an high inflation environment.

Speaking of high inflation the story of the month come from an usual suspect: Zimbabwe.
Do you remember Zimbawe?
Zimbawe is the realm of Mugabe, who once said: "Where money for projects has not been found, we will print it" (https://www.amazon.com/Zimbabwes-Economy-Extraordinary-Measures-Challenges/dp/0797436790)
result:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0251/2392/products/zimbabwe-banknotes-100-trillion-dollars-front.jpeg?v=1378484099

well, they are in yet another "more of the same" iteration: Read "A mouthful of Zollars"  (https://www.newsday.co.zw/2019/05/a-mouthful-of-zollars/)on "The Economist":

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Unique addresses number is not picking up: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: unique addresses is a loose measure of users in the ecosystem. True, many users could share the same address (like exchange addresses used by many users) or vice-versa each user could have many addresses (think about someone trying to entangle his addresses in order to gain some degrees of privacy).
Addresses numbers are also used in some kind of Bitcoin valuations involving Metcalfe’s law, or a law trying do determine the value of a network, users being the asset of such network.
 
COMMENT: Unique Bitcoin addresses slightly raised during last month, almost touching 600,000 the maximum level since last year. Chain activity picking up is a good sign, above all because , as we have seen, this didn't reflected in a raise in fees. 

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob4eba03df50e9ccde.jpeg

It's worth remembering that 600,000 active is a LOT of transactions, and Bitcoin has 3x daily active addresses than the second most used crypto, and  only 3 other cypto surpass 100K active daily addresses according to LongHash (https://twitter.com/longhashdata/status/1133922480547127297).

Source: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

NVT:BEARISH
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Network Value to Transaction (NVT) is defined as the Bitcoin Network Value over the Daily Transaction Volume and be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found in the resource links at the end of the post.


COMMENT: NTV continued to slide down, but remain far-above the levels that have typically marked price bottoms (NTV Ratio is flat over last month and @60, is above 40 signals a bottom on the market). Risk on the downside have somewhat muted, but the recent price actions diverges from NVT signal, calling in a pullback, even thou, comparing to what we said last month,  bottom is probably already in.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobfdae00d662ac189a.jpeg

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Realized Cap: NEUTRAL
Previous Month: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: The realized cap attempts to improve the market cap by valuing different part of the Bitcoin supply at different prices , instead of using the daily close as market cap does: every coin, or more properly every UTXO is valued at the price of their creation. In a less technically correct explanation let’s say that  while Market Cap use the last traded price and multiplies it times by the coins in circulation, Realized Cap computes  the total value paid for each coin at the price they last moved on the blockchain .You can look at this indicator as an improvement to the market capitalization, a very misleading indicator for crypto currencies, trying to capture the “true hodling value” of Bitcoin.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob77ca92b26e627c02.jpeg


COMMENT: Price action in last month  drove realized cap marginally higher, the divergence we observed last month disappeared and now both indicator are pointing north, so picture has marginally improved for second month in a row.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

MVRV: NEUTRAL
Previous month: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE:  MVRV (Market Value to Realised Value Ratio) (https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-mvrv-ratio/) is an indicator was designed by David Puell and Murad Mahmudov and is simply the ratio of Market Cap / Realised Cap. It’s useful for getting a sense of when the exchange traded price is below “fair value” and is also quite useful for spotting market tops and bottoms. Refer to linked Woobull website for an in-depth explanation.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobb288fbaa0fa1cf26.jpeg

COMMENT: Market price movement last month made this indicator continue his rise from 1.25 to 1.75, as we said this is reinforcing the idea bottom has been priced in, and bodes well for further upside. Still not in full Bullish territory for the moment thou.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

USD Exchange Trade Volume: NEUTRAL
Previous month Status: BEARISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

RATIONALE: Exchange traded futures are the closest instrument to Bitcoin Wall Street can touch to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. Provided the price will follow quite closely the Bitcoin price, or what can be observed in the relevant “walled gardens” used to settle the futures, what is interesting for us is the contract volumes, that can give us a few hints of the interest Wall Street has towards the digital gold.

COMMENT: Overall traded volumes are on the rise since a few months:
 
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob9158b16427cd9a6d.jpeg


Spot volumes increased sharply from 325 billion USD in  March, from 352 billion USD in April.

Meanwhile, futures volumes from bitFlyer Lighting and BitMEX combined around the 50 billions mark similarly to the previous month.
These volumes should be reliable and not impacted by fake figures.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobd13bbb4168cdf198.jpeg

Regulated bitcoin derivatives product volumes are dominated by CME, who saw a 263% increase in average trading volume in April. This is followed by Grayscale’s GBTC product, and the dying CBOE’s bitcoin futures. CME’s bitcoin futures product volumes increased from 70.5 million USD to 256 million USD in April. Meanwhile, Grayscale’s bitcoin trust product (GBTC), also increased in terms of average trading volume in April to 29.7 million USD (239%).

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob4d97dca797bcfcbe.jpeg

Exchange traded futures still represent a tiny fraction of total futures trading in Bitcoin: futures represent roughly 24% of trading in Bitcoin (76% being spot transactions), and only 6% of this 24% is traded on traditional exchange traded Futures. This data is constant since last month, but bigger shares has been captured by CME that has been trading a record volume of 6.6 USD Billions.

DEXs represent only a small fraction of global spot exchange volume (0.14%, without a clear trend over last months), trading a
monthly total of 447 million USD in March.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob096d8dd8ab638ebf.jpeg

An important limit is that on these exchanges it's not possible to trade stablecoins, that represent roughly the 80% of spot volumes:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob2df9b56e9ac20692.jpeg

Crypto to crypto exchange trading volume, it represented 84.5% of total spot volume in April, so probably this means  fresh money slowly crawled from FiatMoney or Bitcoin to Stablecoins volume  down to other altcoins.

Despite the bullishness on last month report, DEX's are still failing to materialize any impact on the big pictures: Binance DEX is still of the chart, also no news from other Dexs' regarding further expansion or result of LN implementation (like HodlHodl LN tests we reported about in the last post).

Cumulate short positions built on the month of April, as expected went rekkt and were closed in the red:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc50266d09d9f8a01.jpeg

We told you so.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Exchange Scrutiny: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term
Previous month Status: BULLISH
Rationale: exchanges are the weak link in the Bitcoin ecosystem: poor operations, subpar technologies, prone to frauds, scams and every kind of market rigging schemes (pump and dumps, market manipulations etc: basically every illicit operation banned in traditional financial markets since 20 years ago, to say the least). Every month news report of lost founds, hacked accounts, founder's frauds. Every news is a Darwin's push for the Bitcoin ecosystem toward a more efficient functioning.

COMMENT: Another month has passed, another round of hacked accounts at exchange. we first started the month with 7000 BTC stole from Binance (https://www.hodlbot.io/blog/binance-hack).

Not surprisingly investors are keen to own GBTC shares: that trust shares are priced at a 30% average premium over theoretical BTC par value, but the custody is so simplified and streamlined many investors thinks it's worth it.

Let's say investors are flocking to most reputable account to hold and secure their cryptoassets at a state of the art level: Coinbase Custody Now Has $1 Billion of Crypto Under Management (https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-custody-now-has-1-billion-of-crypto-under-management-ceo-says). Other smaller exchanges are struggling with the scale of investment required to stay in the competitive arena. The smaller ones are just begging for funding to stay alive (https://www.coindesk.com/collapsed-cryptopia-exchange-founder-wants-you-to-put-funds-in-his-new-project), whilst other bigger, Like Kraken are trying to fund themselves trying to siphon funds from customers selling shares at a vastly overvalued levels (https://cointelegraph.com/news/kraken-10-million-equity-sale-with-bnktothefuture-seeks-to-democratize-access).

Some analysis also traced the origin of this month rally movement to People wanting to get out troubled exchanges.  Chain analysis saw outflows from Bitfinex in 1.7 billions (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/bitcoin-rally-is-masking-capital-flight-from-crypto-exchanges), probably related to the Thether issues (Bitfinex cold wallet chan be tracker here (https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/wallet/Bitfinex-coldwallet)). BTC Price on the exchange experienced high premium over other venues (up to 6%). This should be a thing of the past as Blockstream has integrated Liquid into Bitfinex (https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoins-liquid-sidechain-makes-a-splash-on-bitfinex/), allowing faste and effortless BTC transaction towards other exchanges.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

HODL Waves: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term
Previous month Status: BULLISH

RATIONALE: Bitcoin HODL Waves is a visualization by Unchained Capital (https://blog.unchained-capital.com/bitcoin-data-science-pt-1-hodl-waves-7f3501d53f63), it shows the cross section of Bitcoin held in wallets grouped by the age since they last moved. The upper contours, represent supply (old coins that have remained unmoved) while the lower contours represent new demand (coins that have recently shifted). The composite view clearly shows each bull cycle bringing in new demand. This visualization is useful for locating exactly where the market timing is during its long term oscillations between bull and bear phases.
TL,DR: The area Above each line is the amount of "coins" not moved since the relevant time horizon.

COMMENT: The chart is a continuation of last month's with all lines pointing south: not only 12m is pointing down but now also 18m becomes evident: strong hands are still hodling strong!

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob71e143f529af2f18.jpeg

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

A few interesting reports:

• Circle Research 1Q19 (http://research.circle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Circle-Research-1Q19-Retrospective-1.pdf)
  
• Market Surveillance Report BTI institute (https://www.bti.live/reports-april2019/)
  
• Bitcoin Heavy Accumulation Adamant Capital   (https://docsend.com/view/jwr8qwx)
  
• 15 Claims Against Lightning, Answered   (https://medium.com/@thecryptoconomy/dont-count-your-fud-before-the-lightning-strikes-15-claims-against-lightning-answered-9671d4a663a9)
  

Bitcoin Models reference list:

• Introducing NVT Ratio (Bitcoin's PE Ratio), use it to detect bubbles (https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/)
  
• When did Bitcoin's investment era begin? A study using NVT. (https://woobull.com/bitcoins-early-investment-era-under-nvt-ratio/)
  
• Realized Cap (https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/)
  
• MVRV (https://blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-market-value-to-realized-value-mvrv-ratio-3ebc914dbaee)
  
• CME future (https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html)
  
• https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
  

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

Bonus Section:
BEST Tweet of the month:


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob9104dba38b144e22.jpeg
Twitter link (https://twitter.com/coincenter/status/1126574631605997569)

Yet another time someone is blatantly proposing to Shut down Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a competitive push for Fiat money. Fiat money can beat BTC not with governments banning BTC, but becoming better (becoming hard money) and making BTC useless in the first place (almost impossible).
Another good read on the topic.

Why Outlawing Cryptocurrency Purchases is a Terrible Idea (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/why-bill-banning-cryptocurrency-purchases-americans-terrible-idea)


Another bad example of "Shut Down Bitcoin proposal": Joseph Stiglitz: ‘We should shut down the cryptocurrencies’ (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/02/joseph-stiglitz-we-should-shutdown-the-cryptocurrencies.html)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc35249e7277d5d95.jpeg

As usual I would like to thanks everyone who contributed to this post, in particular the guys in the Bitcoin Pump! thread on the Italian board for invaluable exchange of ideas and help in keeping track of news, as well as the whole WO's family for moral support and entertainment.

What are your thoughts?

It is worth reading these reports as well as the other points of view of the crypto experts. However, what we really see is that somebody wants to confuse investors and traders: BTC ups and downs happen too often.

@Filippone this thread is now a fixed monthly reference point, a detailed and complete report, which embraces the Bitcoin analysis from the graph to the transactions, from the news in publications to the expected ones.
I personally believe that the fund was touched last February but I also believe that before this end of the year, between August and October, we will see an important new Bitcoin thrust, which obviously will bring down the entire market; how far he can go I can't say: I think between $ 4200-5000. It would be really horrible to break the support and the February minimum of $ 3000, with daily closing; this would mean starting a new bearish cycle, and still a long phase of adjustment and consolidation.

@finbad the ups and downs of Bitcoin have always been and always will be, as are all the assets and assets in other markets; the difference is that in the other markets we see minimal fluctuations, from 0.1% to 1% per day, while in this young market (due to its nature and its volume, minimal, almost insignificant) we observe variations even of 20 % per day.
When we have this market that will have a capitalization of 10 and over $ trillion, then we will observe minimal fluctuations!

Thanks,
I put a lot of effort in this post, and I am trying to make it more and more interesting.
If you or anyone else reading this post feel I am missing some important piece of information or analysis, please let me know!

Previous updates:

January  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)	OP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)	3,413	4/-/1
February  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)	3,791	3/1/4
March  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)	4,096	5/3/3
April  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50841890#msg50841890)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50841890#msg50841890)	5,269	5/5/1
May  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51296005#msg51296005)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51296005#msg51296005)	8,277	5/5/1
June  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51680720#msg51680720)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51680720#msg51680720)	9,800	8/3/0

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Previous Poll:
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobef83f6321594a1ac.jpeg

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Halving: BULLISH
Last Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium

Rationale: Yes, if you read me in the past months you know this is the main reason I am bullish on bitcoin.
I was bullish for the halving even before getting in contact with PlanB (https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD), but he then more rigorously formalised what I had as a gut-feeling.



Last month I posted something regarding market anticipating halving. Well, this is probably an interesting point of view, but apparently GrayScale played down this explanation in one of their report about halving:


https://grayscale.co/the-next-bitcoin-halving/

This is quite interesting, as if the market is not efficient enough to incorporate all public information available yet, then there is money to be made trying to front run it. On the other hand it is worrisome that a money manager overseeing an investment pool of more than 3 BLN USD (https://www.ccn.com/crypto/grayscale-hits-3-billion-assets-bitcoin-price-rages-on/2019/06/27/) admits his clients who are so desperate investing in BTC being ready to pay a premium of over 40% (https://bitcoinist.com/grayscale-bitcoin-price-premium-sparks-another-big-move/) also don't understand the basic concepts of the technology .


Also, Halving on his own is not a sufficient condition to provide a boost in value, rather than a necessary condition.
Something that can confirm that is the poor result PlanB had studying SF model in case of Litecoin:

https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/1137352369321234432

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8itSoMXYAA3tNw.png


 
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Layer 2 applications: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: Bitcoin has a low throughput for his on-chain transaction. Corollary of this Bitcoin protocol feature, is that not every transaction need the level of security guaranteed by an on-chain transaction. So we are building other solutions on the base of Bitcoin Protocol, known as Layer 2 solutions.
This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralised, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers adding robustness and immutability to the protocol itself (immutability of a protocol should be considered a feature, not a bug. Research the DAO disaster for an example).

Comment: Lightning Network had a massive growth in capacity and after having flattened for a couple of months has now started to decline in BTC terms MoM:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob89fec222b50f41a0.jpeg

I am still bullish! LN network capacity in BTC declined, but USD terms grew more than 15%! Due to the increase in BTC USD price probably users have been taking away liquidity from nodes: if LN is really used for payments, I guess the same capacity in FIAT value can be achieved with less bitcoin, so, this why the draining in BTC terms, but actually payment capacity has increased.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob8b1b5a64d3003665.jpeg

As I said last month capacity is of course an important parameter, but not the only one to focus on, but there are other important factors to consider. Usability and broad user experience is one of the most important now and we saw various improvements on the software itself and third party support.
LN is anyway getting tractions, and has started to be recognised as one of the most robust candidates for Bitcoin scaling as suggested in this interesting article: Lightning Network Study. Will this technology become the new standard for Bitcoin transactions?  (https://datalight.me/blog/researches/lightning-network-study-will-this-technology-become-the-new-standart-for-bitcoin-transactions/).

Also appears that LN could be used for enhancing privacy::Samourai, Nodl to Launch Bitcoin Lightning Node With Mixing Features (https://www.coindesk.com/samourai-nodl-to-launch-bitcoin-lightning-node-with-mixing-features)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Transactions number: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Short Term
 
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?timespan=180days

Rationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalisation, transaction number cannot be discarded.

Comment: Despite dramatic rise in BTC price during last month, transaction number has remained quite flat. Transaction number is in the high “recent range” and on various days broke the 400k daily confirmed transactions, the highest levels since November 2017, but failed breaking higher, following price. This is really strange actually, as we would expect daily transaction to increase with price, until hitting maximum theoretical bandwidth:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob3ff2f1919084238a.jpeg

Notably something moved also in the mempool, where there were some kind of actions after months of empty mempool:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobabec0e648de765c1.jpeg

Number of pending transactions grew notably and pending transaction fees grew up to 20 BTC, a level we didn't see since last May: market is regulating himself and getting into block is less easy after months of empty mempool.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf69fc9dbf690bad3.jpeg

Again this rise in fees is not perfectly consistent with transaction not picking up, also the growth in hashing power has been very spectacular, with difficulty now at historical high: this  should have more generated blocks than theoretically allowed, so more transactions being confirmed and hence more throughput.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc81e6441f8571b45.jpeg

Of course growth in hashrate has followed the price action, and not caused it, as with higher BTC price older and less efficient miners could be put back into production, raising the total hashpower adding fuel to the natural growth rate caused by more efficient ASICS being put at work. This growth in Hashrate has contributed making Bitcoin the most secure chain around. True cryptoassets require decentralisation, so securing POW is fundamental for security. Here you can see how secure is Bitcoin compared to shitcoins:

www.howmanyconfs.com

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob5dde96a754a6a2bd.jpeg

Bitcoin is 6x more secure than ETH or 23x more secure than BCH. Security of the chain is a necessary condition to value.

If you want to follow mining profitability, to have some clue about where hashrate is headed to, you can refer to this website tracking mining profitability in realtime (https://coinrate.com/cryptocurrency-mining-prices-and-profitability-by-country-in-realtime):
Figures are maybe not really correct due to the website calculation being based on old mining specifications, but there you can get a "feeling" of the situation.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob071cc42ad00cf467.jpeg

Last months we discussed one potential source of on-chain transaction coming from Veriblock, but the impact of such transactions hasn't been analysed accurately still.
For sure we can observe a rise in popularity in coinjoin services. As privacy and fungibility currently are biggest Bitcoin protocol limitation, waiting for more evolved solutions, we anedoctically observe a rise in popularity of Coinjoin rounds, that recently got in the dimension of 100 users (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-users-perform-what-might-be-the-largest-coinjoin-ever).
Of course we are talking about decentralised solutions, as centralised anonymising solutions are facing tough times see Long-running BTC mixer Bitcoin Blender voluntarily ceases operations (http://(https://coingeek.com/long-running-btc-mixer-bitcoin-blender-voluntarily-ceases-operations/)).
Also we note that transactions in shitcoins are going south: take the king of Shitcoin, ETH: Ethereum’s Transaction Volume is Down 40% in a Year (https://www.longhash.com/news/ethereums-transaction-volume-is-down-40-in-a-year)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg


Bitcoin is working for what it was meant for by Satoshi: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: Bitcoin is digital gold. This means that can serve an uncensorable store of value in now derailed regimes. As more and more government indulges in hopeless funding/money printing options, in many cases BTC is the only way to preserve the right to defend your own wealth against (hyper)inflation

Last  month we looked at Colombian trading volumes on Localbitcoin, but Bitcoin Exchange volumes are soaring all over the world in derailed economies: Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela in South America, but also Tanzania, Kazakhstan and many more other countries all over the World (https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-price-rockets-all-time-highs-countries-crippling-fiat). USD Trading volumes are still high in these days, despite BTC volatility: apparently volatility in BTCUSD is still lower than volatility observed in local FIATSHITCOINUSD:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob97ee1717b515ba43.jpeg

It is also worth nothing that to be a truly uncensorable Store of Value Bitcoin has to evade legacy KYC/AML  requirements.  Recent news (see All Global Crypto Exchanges Must Now Share Customer Data, FATF Rules  (https://www.coindesk.com/fatf-crypto-travel-rule)) has driven more and more attention to fiat gateways, hence it is natural that people try to flee to more privacy-oriented ways to convert fiat into crypto, or viceversa.
This is what is becoming evident when we see volumes on KYC-free volumes increasing. True, volumes are still tiny compared to traditional exchanges  and big percentage changes can be caused by little absolute volumes, but here is the trends that matters.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob5a0808d5dc1c20b1.jpeg

It is worth noting that  LocalBitcoins Removes Cash-for-Crypto Trading Option (https://www.coindesk.com/localbitcoins-removes-cash-for-crypto-trading-option). Hence it is not anymore possible to exchange BTC anonymously via LocalBitcoins.

Also worth noting that a Satoshi is more valuable than 7 fiat currencies:

https://twitter.com/Rhythmtrader/status/1144212374574051328


Source: coin.dance (https://coin.dance/volume)

Last Hour Update:
The news that  gained much traction and was used to reinforce the idea as Bitcoin as last resort from Fiscal repression.
I do like the conveyed message, but the whole newswire is, put simply. Bullshit.
IF we go and see the relevant offer on Localbitcoins, linked here (https://localbitcoins.com/ad/973079/cash-out-your-bitcoins-ecocash?amount=100):

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob37ee86f861753f6a.jpeg

we see the little term of the trade:

As I said in one of my earlier posts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg51676090#msg51676090):

The offer was about RTGS, the local currency officially pegged to USD 1:1, but apparently with an higher exchange. So probably the guy was trying to sell bitcoin and cash in a fiat shitcoin at a more devalued rate of around 6.8.
So to recap:
In Zimbabwe you can buy bitcoin selling USD@11,400
Or
You can buy bitcoins selling RTRS officially worth 1:1 with bitcoin, but in reality (read street market) a way more devalued 6.8 per USD.

Primer on RTGS:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47361572

EDIT: Someone decided to set the record straight, with a superior (not a challenging task) piece of journalism:  No, Bitcoin Isn’t Really Selling for $76,000 in Zimbabwe: Analysts (https://cointelegraph.com/news/is-bitcoin-really-selling-for-76-000-in-zimbabwe)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Unique addresses number: BULLISH
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: unique addresses is a loose measure of users in the ecosystem. True, many users could share the same address (like exchange addresses used by many users) or vice-versa each user could have many addresses (think about someone trying to entangle his addresses in order to gain some degrees of privacy).
Addresses numbers are also used in some kind of Bitcoin valuations involving Metcalfe’s law, or a law trying do determine the value of a network, users being the asset of such network.
 
COMMENT: Unique Bitcoin addresses continued their slow but steady growth raised during last month, almost touching 650,000 the maximum level since last year, just before the bull run. Chain activity picking up is a good sign, above all because , as we have seen, this only marginally reflected in a raise in fees. 

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob8d662a07f74f17ea.jpeg

As we outlined last month, it's worth remembering that 600,000 active is a LOT of transactions when comparing to other cryptos.
For next month I am thinking about joining all this analysis on a comprehensive "Bitcoin Blockchain Health Check" section.

Source: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2years&daysAverageString=7


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

NVT:BULLISH
Previous month Status:NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Network Value to Transaction (NVT) is defined as the Bitcoin Network Value over the Daily Transaction Volume and be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found in the resource links at the end of the post.


COMMENT: NTV reversed his slide down, and pointing higher to a solid growth in market price. NTV Ratio is bullish over last month and @66, is above 40 signals a bottom on the market but still well away from dangerous bubble-detecting values. Both indicators signal an healthy price action for the moment, turning this indicator to BULLISH.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob1c232ecf95b34efd.jpeg

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Realized Cap: BULLISH
Previous Month: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: The realised cap attempts to improve the market cap by valuing different part of the Bitcoin supply at different prices, instead of using the daily close as market cap does: every coin, or more properly every UTXO is valued at the price of their creation. In a less technically correct explanation let’s say that  while Market Cap use the last traded price and multiplies it times by the coins in circulation, Realised Cap computes  the total value paid for each coin at the price they last moved on the blockchain. You can look at this indicator as an improvement to the market capitalisation, a very misleading indicator for crypto currencies, trying to capture the “true hodling value” of Bitcoin.


COMMENT: Price action in last month drove realised cap again higher. Nothing spectacular here, but I guess It's an health consequence of higher bitcoin realised prices. Being market Cap still above realised cap we are still poised to a bullish environment. Upgrading to bullish.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

MVRV: NEUTRAL
Previous month: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE:  MVRV (Market Value to Realised Value Ratio) (https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-mvrv-ratio/) is an indicator was designed by David Puell and Murad Mahmudov and is simply the ratio of Market Cap / Realised Cap. It’s useful for getting a sense of when the exchange traded price is below “fair value” and is also quite useful for spotting market tops and bottoms.
Awe and Wonder, later revised MVRV with a z-score, the resulting MVRV-z provides a clearer picture of the market cycle with tops and bottoms normalising around common levels. Refer to linked Woobull website for an in-depth explanation.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobb4d6d5d6d9e2dd22.jpeg

COMMENT: Market price movement last month made this indicator accelerate his rise from 1.75 to 2.50, and bodes well for further upside, as confirms other indicator signalling market is not approaching irrational exuberance. Price consolidation is a welcome opportunity to re evaluate scenarios before going further up in an healthy movement not driven (only) by FOMO.

For next month I am thinking about joining all this analysis on a comprehensive "Bitcoin Pricing Models" section.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

USD Exchange Trade Volume: NEUTRAL
Previous month Status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Exchange traded futures are the closest instrument to Bitcoin Wall Street can touch to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. Provided the price will follow quite closely the Bitcoin price, or what can be observed in the relevant “walled gardens” used to settle the futures, what is interesting for us is the contract volumes, that can give us a few hints of the interest Wall Street has towards the digital gold.

COMMENT: Overall traded volumes are on the rise since a few months:

 https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob4dcf0171d0ae7dec.jpeg

Bitcoin CME future volumes  (sum of all traded position) and Open Interests (net open positions on daily settlements) have experienced record after record during last month.  at CME (https://cryptonomist.ch/en/2019/06/28/new-historical-records-bitcoin-futures/), after CBOE settled last trade on his now defunct BTC future.

We have seen many reports of institutional investors flocking to Bitcoin:

• Genesis Capital: Institutional Activity in Crypto Up 300% in 12 Months  (https://cointelegraph.com/news/genesis-capital-institutional-activity-in-crypto-up-300-in-12-months)
  
• PwC and Elwood publish first annual global crypto hedge fund report (https://www.hedgeweek.com/2019/05/13/275678/pwc-and-elwood-publish-first-annual-global-crypto-hedge-fund-report)
  
• Bitcoin futures see growing institutional take-up (https://www.hedgeweek.com/2019/05/13/275678/pwc-and-elwood-publish-first-annual-global-crypto-hedge-fund-report)
  
• Crypto Spring Has Arrived & Institutional Money Will Move In: Barry Silbert (https://www.ccn.com/crypto-spring-institutional-money-barry-silbert/)
  

The answer from exchanges has been slowed by regulators, that have been reluctant to provide markets with the much needed instruments they have been asking for.
Well, something is moving on that front:

• TD Ameritrade-Backed ErisX Gets Green Light to Settle Futures in Bitcoin (https://www.coindesk.com/td-ameritrade-backed-erisx-gets-green-light-to-settle-futures-in-bitcoin)
  
  Quote
  The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has cleared the way for crypto derivatives provider ErisX to offer futures contracts with a new license approval Monday.
  
  ErisX, which is backed by U.S. brokerage TD Ameritrade, announced that the CFTC granted it a derivatives clearing organization (DCO) license, acting as a secondary approval on top of an existing designated contract market (DCM) license that the exchange already held. The approvals mean the company can now launch crypto futures products under the auspices of the U.S. regulator.
  
  
  
• Putting Bakkt’s Bitcoin Futures to the Test (https://medium.com/bakkt-blog/putting-bakks-bitcoin-futures-to-the-test-47e381b7dda1)
  
  Quote
  On July 22, two days after Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary, Bakkt will initiate user acceptance testing for its bitcoin futures listed and traded at ICE Futures U.S. and cleared at ICE Clear US.
  
• CFTC Approves LedgerX to Settle Futures in Real Bitcoin (https://www.coindesk.com/cftc-approves-ledgerx-to-settle-futures-in-real-bitcoin)
  
  Quote
  The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has cleared bitcoin derivatives provider LedgerX to offer physically settled bitcoin futures contracts.
  
  The CFTC said Tuesday it had approved LedgerX’s application for a designated contract market (DCM) license, meaning the company can now offer the new futures contracts. LedgerX is the second company to receive approval to offer physically settled bitcoin futures; other firms, such as Intercontinental Exchange’s Bakkt, Seed CX and ErisX plan to enter this market.
  

Competition is heating up.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

Exchange Scrutiny: BULLISH
Previous month Status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: exchanges are the weak link in the Bitcoin ecosystem: poor operations, subpar technologies, prone to frauds, scams and every kind of market rigging schemes (pump and dumps, market manipulations etc: basically every illicit operation banned in traditional financial markets since 20 years ago, to say the least). Every month news report of lost founds, hacked accounts, founder's frauds. Every news is a Darwin's push for the Bitcoin ecosystem toward a more efficient functioning.

COMMENT:Another busy month in the exchange world. Not only regulators are cracking down exchanges, with the already mentioned measures to enforce data sharing and compulsory KYC, but also general public is going to audit exchanges operations in order to protect their investments.
Cryptocompare Exchange Benchmark goes in this direction:
Why CryptoCompare Created an Exchange Benchmark (https://blog.cryptocompare.com/why-cryptocompare-created-an-exchange-benchmark-a9f382c77e38)
Exchange volume data, liquidity, and practices are not anymore taken for granted, but put under scrutiny. This is going to push for the better exchanges survival: this is meant to change the exchange landscape massively. This pressure means exchanges will face huge expenses to face regulatory pressure, and will have to keep their operations at the state of the art to gain trader's orders.
I see many of them exiting the competitive space in the coming months (this is good) and huge barriers being created for incumbents (this is bad).

First findings are that still 30% of volumes comes from "subpar" exchanges, leaving much room for improvements:

https://twitter.com/CryptoCompare/status/1140560727079628800?s=20

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D9QVMv3XoAIpGsE?format=png&name=small

You can read the full report here: Exchange Benchmarking (https://www.cryptocompare.com/media/35650785/cryptocompare_exchange_benchmarking_2019_06.pdf)


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

HODL Waves: BULLISH
Previous month Status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

RATIONALE: Bitcoin HODL Waves is a visualisation by Unchained Capital (https://blog.unchained-capital.com/bitcoin-data-science-pt-1-hodl-waves-7f3501d53f63), it shows the cross section of Bitcoin held in wallets grouped by the age since they last moved. The upper contours, represent supply (old coins that have remained unmoved) while the lower contours represent new demand (coins that have recently shifted). The composite view clearly shows each bull cycle bringing in new demand. This visualisation is useful for locating exactly where the market timing is during its long term oscillations between bull and bear phases.
TL,DR: The area Above each line is the amount of "coins" not moved since the relevant time horizon.

COMMENT: Ops, something is changing! 12m lines flattened out, hence some hands moved from the #stonghands, to the #weakhands camp. This probably has to do with the MVRV chart: if you are a #weakhands once the price recovers and you are In the money with your trades you want to get rid of those coins you bought. This is a decision you are going to regret in a short period of time!

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob762728ae9d321b6a.jpeg

A new concept similar to Bitcoin HodlWaves is Bitcoin Dormancy. You can read more about this article Bitcoin
Average Dormancy (https://medium.com/adaptivecapital/bitcoin-average-dormancy-28f88ea4c2ce).

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*bPW9SzEIA_j8ozMpFPJ0jw.png


This concept is not new, but i hope there will be some update on this, as it combines some interesting, yet not so immediate to understand indicators, combining them in a synthetic and informative way.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

BONUS SECTION:
FACEBOOK LIBRA: BULLISH

The elephant in the room for this report has been the Libra announcement by Facebook.
A lot of commentaries has been done on this topic, religion wars have been fought, and still there's not a clear idea on the matter, also because the released material didn't provide all the details.

My basic comment can be summarised in the following bullet points:

• Libra is not a cryptocurrency (https://cryptonomist.ch/en/2019/06/12/antonopoulos-facebooks-globalcoin/): it is not because lacks one of the 5 pillars of a cryptocurency: Decentralisation. Libra is something different, I would say it is not a FIAT currency, nor a Cryptocurrency. Which extreme will lean towards has yet to be determined, and this is only in the hands of Facebook.
  
• Libra is not in competition with Bitcoin: Bitcoin is digital gold and allows personal financial Sovereignty. Libra wants to be a super effective centralised Mean of Payments. Libra is in competition with traditional banking and credit cards, as pointed out by Bitmex CEO  Arthur Hayes, in this interview Facebook’s Libra Will Benefit Bitcoin But ‘Destroy’ Banks, Says Industry  (https://cointelegraph.com/news/facebooks-libra-will-benefit-bitcoin-but-destroy-banks-says-industry).
  In a sense, LIBRA is in competition with Lightning Network. Again, best user experience will lead to success.
  
• Libra is a game changer for Central Banks. Central banks have been quite vocal at the releases of Libra details. This is a reaction dictated by fear. Money has been the main control instrument of Central States over the population and the main leverage for fiscal stimulus. This critical tools cannot be handed out to a private corporation (all this is their opinion, not mine). Facebook has been ordered to top developing Libra (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-18/maxine-waters-demands-facebook-stop-all-development-libra-crypto-project) and Zuckerberg has been immediately summoned to appear in front of Congress (https://www.coindesk.com/halt-libra-us-lawmakers-call-for-hearings-on-facebooks-crypto).
  
• Long term Target of Libra is the “Un-dollarization of the world”: libra would be backed by a basket of FIAT currencies, USD, EUR, GBP and YEN to start, hence the scope is global adoption lessening the need of a world-based unit of account or mean of payments: this means reducing the role played by the dollar as we intend today. This is YUGE and fits with the turmoil by central bankster. To me this is the central key aspect of the whole libra thing. Nothing short of this would be irrelevant. 
  
• Long term Effect of Libra on Bitcoin is positive: I could spend a lot of words here, but I will quote Caitling Long, who wrote What Facebook's Cryptocurrency Means: 6 Predictions (https://www.forbes.com/sites/caitlinlong/2019/06/09/what-facebooks-cryptocurrency-means-6-predictions/): a a well written piece, I second 100%. On the sixth bullet point in particular she states what I tought is the long term arc for Libra in relation to Bitcoin:
  
  Quote
  Facebook’s cryptocurrency will turn out, in the end, to be a Trojan horse that benefits bitcoin.
  Here’s my biggest prediction: Facebook’s foray into cryptocurrency will end up benefiting bitcoin. It will take time, but Facebook will greatly accelerate the pace of teaching people about cryptocurrencies. And when this happens, more people will turn to bitcoin for one simple reason—bitcoin is scarce, while Facebook’s cryptocurrency is not. People will migrate over time to the most honest ledger for storing their hard-earned wealth—and that’s not fiat currencies or derivatives thereof, including Facebook’s cryptocurrency.
  
  This phenomenon actually happened in Venezuela, as early bitcoiner Nick Spanos recently pointed out to me. When the Maduro regime introduced the ill-fated petro cryptocurrency, the government made a concerted effort to educate Venezuelans about cryptocurrencies—and it correlated to a spike in bitcoin use by Venezuelans.
  
  Facebook’s foray into cryptocurrency will likely end up being a beneficial detour on the path to broader bitcoin adoption. Bring it on!
  
  
  
• Regulatory Clarity: as stated by Longhash  How Facebook's Cryptocurrency Could Help Bitcoin Adoption (https://www.longhash.com/news/how-exactly-facebooks-crypto-can-aid-bitcoin) Libra will force regulators to adobpt a common, global stance on cryptocurrencies. The stake is too high to let it unruled, or with discrepancies between regulations.
  
  
  Quote
  Facebook's cryptocurrency should give the broader digital asset space some much-needed regulatory clarity. At present, governments across the globe generally don’t agree on what to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general. In the United States, regulatory attitudes toward cryptocurrency vary by state.
  If Facebook makes cryptocurrency more mainstream, lawmakers will be forced to better understand the sector. This could lead to governments around the world establishing a proper framework for cryptocurrency companies and users. This is unlikely to eliminate all the friction in the crypto regulatory sphere, like the SEC's hesitation to approve a Bitcoin ETF, but could help establish some basic rules.
  Regulatory uncertainty is not good for innovation. It can prevent industry leaders from entering certain jurisdictions. Proper guidelines can pave the way for traditional banks to get involved, as well as entice more venture capital firms and consumers to invest.
  
  
  

Others Read:

• Website: https://calibra.com/
  
• White paper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/
• Github repository: https://github.com/libra
  
• Libra currently looks more like a fiat currency than a cryptocurrency (https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/19/libra-currently-looks-more-like-a-fiat-currency-than-a-cryptocurrency/)
  
• Libra, a Cyberpunk Nightmare in the Midst of Crypto Spring (https://hackernoon.com/libra-a-cyberpunk-nightmare-in-the-midst-of-crypto-spring-5543b6f6e34b)
  
• How Will Facebook’s Libra “Blockchain” Really Work?An expert guide to the social media company’s foray into cryptocurrency By Jameson Loop (https://medium.com/@lopp/thoughts-on-libra-blockchain-49b8f6c26372)
  
• An in-depth review of Facebook's long-anticipated entry into cryptocurrency (https://info.binance.com/en/research/marketresearch/libra.html)
  

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg
A few interesting reports:

• A Note on the Bitcoin Rally (https://medium.com/@adamant_capital/a-note-on-the-bitcoin-rally-33eea143a234)
  
• JUN 19 - BTC Mining Report by Coinshares (https://coinshares.co.uk/)
  
  Quote
  In this report we investigate the geographical distribution, composition, efficiency, electricity consumption and electricity sources of the Bitcoin mining network.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin is likely to hit $100,000 by 12/31/2021 (https://offthechain.substack.com/p/bitcoin-is-likely-to-hit-100000-by)
  

Bitcoin Models reference list:

• Introducing NVT Ratio (Bitcoin's PE Ratio), use it to detect bubbles (https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/)
  
• When did Bitcoin's investment era begin? A study using NVT. (https://woobull.com/bitcoins-early-investment-era-under-nvt-ratio/)
  
• Realized Cap (https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/)
  
• MVRV (https://blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-market-value-to-realized-value-mvrv-ratio-3ebc914dbaee)
  
• CME future (https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html)
  
• https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
  

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob7564bcf9b83fa236.jpeg

As usual I would like to thanks everyone who contributed to this post, in particular the guys in the Bitcoin Pump! thread on the Italian board for invaluable exchange of ideas and help in keeping track of news, as well as the whole WO's family for moral support and entertainment.

What are your thoughts?

suberb analysis
thank you so much for this precise and accurate report

i hope in a rain of merits for this amazing report :)

Thanks!
I wish I knew a merit source!

Haha, you've already got Hero merit, all you need now is a hundred twenty memes and shitposts!

Daaaamn  :o, +3 merits !

It will be flat until September comes. Be positive! Bitcoin halving will push bitcoin to move up. A lot of people are speculating it to increase and beat its ATH this 2019 due to the fact that bitcoin mining will be halved by May 2020. If you will just look the support level, it is really hard to break the 9k supports. In addition, whales are awake in this year. There are many whales at binance who bought hundreds of bitcoin back when there was momentum from 9k to 13k dollars. That is a good sign that bitcoin will continuously move up.

As you can see in the summary, I have never been so positive since I have been writing this repot

entering July this price falls, it seems like it will be difficult to recover in a short time.
maybe even the price will continue to decline
or maybe this is also the beginning of bitcoin returning to fly higher than before.

Excellent analysis and summary Fillippone, as always fixed note  ;)

Personally, I don't expect a new max for this whole summer, with the price recovery in November for the year-end rally; Bitcoin has stopped on the 68.2% Fibonacci retracement, and I believe it will now take a while.

Yes you are right, but even with the ease like this, this is what causes the volalitle of bitcoin to be higher, so it will be difficult to predict even in the next 1 week. We have seen through the market that Bitcoin going to bullish in just 1 - 2 week and then whole market got bearish just in 1 day.

As usual great work Fillippone! Lucky us you don’t get tired writing these analysis!

Nah, we should not tie this current decline to the Month, the month has just started and we still have more and more investors to purchase more coins. Bitcoin believers or investors already know that we are in uptrend and whatever decline they see now will be solely attributed to correction and not because the market has started heading towards bear market again.

This correction is what usually prompt some traders and investor to buy more of bitcoin, because they see it as another opportunity to buy at cheaper price. It will not be too long for us to see it rebound back to the last value it touched before heading back downward. This July would sure bring its own surprise too and I am sure we will definitely get to the value we have never gotten to before the end of the month.

Some people are saying that gold is a hassle to transfer globally. Well. You all just forgot that you don’t really need to transfer gold physically, not when there are companies that handles that, just like GoldMoney. This is a company that stores gold for people and you’re able to access it through your account online and whenever you need it physical they can also ship it to you… but that’s not necessary since they do work of storing it for you. But anyway… cryptocurrency is good, but they are different from gold, cause they are electronic and doesn’t have physical forms.

Not your Vault,
not your Gold.
Ask Bundesbank what happened when they asked FED just to see their gold.
Not to mention how long it took (spoler alert: many years) to have it back in Deutchland.
Same thing with Maduro and Bank of England.
SO in your case. What happens if government seizes your gold@GoldMoney?

A comment to the "transaction number" indicator:

I think in this indicator we have reached already a level where further growth is not longer easy, because the nearer we get to the "theoretical maximum" level, fees rise much faster, which acts like a blocker. Most days of the week, the blockchain is so full and fees are so high that it makes sense to bundle lower-value transactions you would have sent separately before, or for example buy several items at once (I for example use BTC to pay services like web hosting, and currently it's better to pay several months in advance). Thus, this indicator in my opinion can - at the current "blockchain usage level" - only be a negative indicator for the timeframes when there is less activity than usually (which currently isn't the case).

On a whole I agree with the June analysis, however, LN for me - for this current bubble / short-to-midterm price movement - may be too early to be a "bullish" component. I would currently see it as "neutral", seeing the stagnating adoption numbers (the slow node/channel number growth is actually the most important indicator imo, not the value in BTC). It is, however, obviously a long-term bullish "asset", but I think it will see adoption only after the next bearish intermezzo.

Very nicely put points.
Thank you very much for your inputs.
True, transaction is capped, but as I wrote transaction numbers, hashpower and fees don't add up. I am probably missing something. On-chain transactions are not running at full steam btw.

Point taken on the LN.

I voted "flat" for the end of July but I think we could see lower prices in the short term.


Not only do rising fees discourage some transactions (especially lower value ones) but they pressure users and services to optimize their network usage. Transaction batching, as one example, can drastically lower overall volumes while increasing the average value of transactions.

Network metrics like this are really complex and opaque. I don't like to read into them too deeply for fundamental analysis, but this is still some pretty interesting work from the OP nonetheless.

I voted Über Bullish, and with this very high dominance can easily surpass the last month ATH, so over 14k
There is no transfusion into altcoins, we are seeing here a BTC/fiat or BTC/stable trading dominance, years before, when the BTC was having a correction some alts were spiking, nowdays we are seeing almost BTC only, and this trend can only push the price up.

I am not a great fan of market dominance, as it can be easily manipulated with fake volumes rigging markets (as Bitwise report, this is very common).
Do you think you can use dominance in any productive way?

the faked volumes are for sure inside of those percentages, but also there are faked volumes in altcoins too, so the dominance of ~62.5% in BTC can be treated as a legit one
my opinion is that this high dominance is not productive at all, but we can do nothing, cause what we are seeing here is a corporate money coming in

I mostly agree. However, the strong "dip" in transaction number between mid-2018 and early 2019 in my opinion definitively was an indicator for a "bearish" phase. There was less trading and transacting, and less interest - strong signs for a "Bitcoin winter".

Now with the transaction numbers again nearing the theoretical maximum, there could be two interesting alternative indicators to watch:
- Transaction volume measured in USD (I think here the idea is obvious: if transactions are bundled, then they're also bigger, and USD currently is a relatively good measure for "value")
- Number of newly created UTXOs (I don't know a graph - anyone? - but it could be easily based e.g. on this (https://www.blockchain.com/de/charts/utxo-count?timespan=180days) graph). UTXOs have a higher growth potential than transactions, as an additional UTXO adds less bytes to the blockchain than an additional transaction. So I guess we're much farther away from the theoretical maximum here than with transaction number alone, and thus it could be used still as a bullish indicator.

Previous updates:

January  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)	OP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49596691#msg49596691)	3,413	4/-/1
February  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg49960305#msg49960305)	3,791	3/1/4
March  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50390920#msg50390920)	4,096	5/3/3
April  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50841890#msg50841890)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg50841890#msg50841890)	5,269	5/5/1
May  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51296005#msg51296005)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51296005#msg51296005)	8,277	5/5/1
June  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51680720#msg51680720)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg51680720#msg51680720)	9,800	8/3/0
July  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg52019246#msg52019246)	Update (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5106432.msg52019246#msg52019246)	10,010	7/3/1

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Previous Poll:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf5117c0f9b0af93c.jpeg

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Halving: BULLISH
Last Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium

Rationale: Yes, if you read me in the past months you know this is the main reason I am bullish on bitcoin.
I was bullish for the halving even before getting in contact with PlanB (https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD), but he then more rigorously formalised what I had as a gut-feeling.

Every month the guy provides new food for thoughts. So I am posting a new graph here.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_M_XUcXUAAuRZn?format=png&name=large

This graph is very important for at least two reasons:

• Bitcoin is undervalued from a SF perspective related to other scarce commodities. And eventually Bitcoin is going to be worth 30Trln market valuation, once his stock to flow goes to 100 (2024). Warning: this is uncharted territory.
  
• The fact that many commodities lies on the same straight line (R^2=0.995) assures us that the correlation between SF and price is not a spurious correlation, but it is actually something that is true for every scarce commodity. Very reassuring this feature not holding true for bitcoin only
  

For a more complete understanding of his works I do recommend listening to both Stephen Livera podcasts (https://stephanlivera.com/) where PlanB was the main guest.

In addition we can also think at the incoming halvening as a reason why Bitcoin Dominance is rising: halving is something that characterise Bitcoin only, so, it's impacting only BTC value relative to shitcoins. In addition we saw with LTC, that's going to experience an halvening in the news weeks, that SF doesn't holds for shitcoins. SF is not a sufficient reason for a shitcoin to have value, rather than a necessary condition. At least the Ledger costliness (https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurances-stupid-5dcd1c3f4e41) (the amount paid to validators/transaction selectors per unit of time) is a required condition.

As a last tough I start anyway to believe that next halving is crucial. I don’t know if it’s priced in or not (my gut feeling tells me it’s not), but if price don’t move seriously upward as PlanB suggests, maybe even lagging SF model for up to one year after May 2020, then we could have a proper test of bitcoin value proposition as an experiment of Store of Value/digital gold.
All the institutional money that is supposedly flowing into Bitcoin is surely looking into that.

Just a word on Litecoin Halving: as we outlined last month, it simply doesn't seems to have, beside all the efforts and rhetoric put into place, any price effect. This might be due to the fact that SF models in LTC are not effective at all in predicting value (very low R^2). So take care when comparing to bitcoin.

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Layer 2 applications: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: Bitcoin has a low throughput for his on-chain transaction. Corollary of this Bitcoin protocol feature, is that not every transaction need the level of security guaranteed by an on-chain transaction. So we are building other solutions on the base of Bitcoin Protocol, known as Layer 2 solutions.
This is an “invisible asset” for bitcoin adoption, allowing truly decentralised, trustless, instant payments with ridiculously low fees. This will allow the creation of a whole new industry of payment processors: ending point? Competition with credit cards.
In addition to that every Layer 2 progress allows further developments (layer 3 applications I cannot even think of) and in addition to that strengthens Layer One: the Bitcoin protocol, like a big Jenga game, where every superior layer presses and consolidate lower layers adding robustness and immutability to the protocol itself (immutability of a protocol should be considered a feature, not a bug. Research the DAO disaster for an example).

Comment: Lightning Network has continued to decline both in BTC terms and in USD MoM:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob80153f1993e53939.jpeg

This is the first time both measures decline, together with number of channels. I am still bullish, but this reduction might be analysed with more data in the future: of course growth must be organic and requires a certain degree of capital allocation on each channel, so this might be a temporary "reshaping" of the network.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob95a2b94eb3b0f92b.jpeg

As I said last month capacity or user adoption is of course an important parameter, but not the only one to focus on, but there are other important factors to consider. Usability and broad user experience is one of the most important now and we saw various improvements on the software itself and third party support.

Thinking about downgrading to neutral next month if metrics down resume improving.

Usability this month wasn't improved not on the user side, but on the liquidity provider side:

• LND Labs released a tool to help visualise statistics and manage channels Introducing lndmon: Dockerized Lightning Network Monitoring (https://blog.lightning.engineering/posts/2019/07/24/lndmon-v0.1.html)
  
  Quote
  “As the network has grown over the past year, we’ve noticed gaps in its observability and the need for an easy-to-use tool for routing node operators to manage their nodes.”
  
  https://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/lnd_graph-768x729.png
  
  
• LND labs released new update of their client  Announcing lnd v0.7-beta! (https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2019/07/01/lnd-v0.7.html)
• BlockStream updated their client too: New Release: c-lightning 0.7.1 (https://medium.com/blockstream/new-release-c-lightning-0-7-1-9fca65debeb2)
• BlockStream launched USDt on their Liquid SidecChain: Tether Stablecoin Launches on Blockstream’s Liquid Sidechain (https://www.coindesk.com/tether-stablecoin-launches-on-blockstreams-liquid-network-sidechain)
  
  
  Quote
  Liquid was designed as an additional layer to the bitcoin blockchain to offer the ability to transact large volumes of transactions at a higher speed. At launch, a number of industry firms, including Tether’s sister firm Bitfinex, had already signed up to help manage and transact with the network using its bitcoin-pegged token L-BTC.
  
  With tether entering the network, it will now be possible to make atomic swaps between Liquid BTC and Liquid tethers, a feature that the firms say will offer lower counterparty risk for those carrying out OTC trades. Further, Liquid’s faster block times will allow traders to quickly complete transfers of fiat between exchanges, making more efficient arbitrage trades.
  
  
  

At Blockstream they have skin in the game and studied what a million channel Lightning Network could look like:   Letting a Million Channels Bloom (https://medium.com/blockstream/letting-a-million-channels-bloom-985bdb28660b)

Lastly, an interesting article on how Lightning network works:Lightning Network: The good, the bad and the most talked-about thing in Bitcoin right now (https://medium.com/bitstamp-blog/lightning-network-the-good-the-bad-and-the-most-talked-about-thing-in-bitcoin-right-now-2b1e9e38b4a4)

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Transactions number: NEUTRAL
Last month status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Short Term
 
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?timespan=180days

Rationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalisation, transaction number cannot be discarded.

Comment: As last month price rose dramatically and transaction number remained flat, this month price remained flat and transaction number went dramatically down. Still, this is puzzling as I would expect transaction being positively correlated with price: instead with a flat price, transactions broke the level of 300K:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe8feb093e096f00d.jpeg

As Expected things in the mempool are back to dead calm, after the peak witnessed last month: 

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobe70f794139156270.jpeg

Accordingly pending transaction fees fell to 2.5 BTC or below, 1sat/byte transactions were quite possible during this month: market is regulating himself and getting into block is again easy with empty mempool.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob939a93a5733a8908.jpeg

Veriblock transaction are about 25% of the Bitcoin Total Transactions according to their network monitoring website (https://explore.veriblock.org/network-stats). This is a pretty high figure after being below 10% during last time. This has probably to do with BTCUSD price, as PoP transactions are meant to decrease in number with higher fees (typically associated with bull movements in price).


Hashrate is on a parallel universe of unrestricted climb:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobb8e77e705c4aa0cc.jpeg

Hashrate is on a climb, and it's now almost 8 times higher than Dec'17, when we had ATH in price. This is important as ledger costliness is a prerequisite for a blockchain to have value, and as long as Storing Value on the Bitcoin Blockchain will be secure, then BTC will prosper.
Last month we saw www.howmanyconfs.com to show how bitcoin network is secure thanks to his hashpower. This month we'll see that exact things though the lens of the cost to setup a 51% attack to the chain .

The website https://www.crypto51.app/ give us a nice estimate of this cost:


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob297a1fe285279f26.jpeg

Attacking the bitcoin network for one hours costs 772,000 USD, again, this is more than 6 times the cash needed to take the same attack on ETH.
Last month we warned you about a drop in ETH transactions(Ethereum’s Transaction Volume is Down 40% in a Year (https://www.longhash.com/news/ethereums-transaction-volume-is-down-40-in-a-year)). Apparently this is causing a drop in hasrate too: Ethereum is Becoming Increasingly Vulnerable to Attack (https://www.longhash.com/news/ethereum-is-becoming-increasingly-vulnerable-to-attack): the fewer the transactions, the fewer the economic incentives for the miners, the less hashrate, the less security, the less ledger costliness, the less incentive for user to use such blockchain. A death spiral.

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Unique addresses number: BEARISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: unique addresses is a loose measure of users in the ecosystem. True, many users could share the same address (like exchange addresses used by many users) or vice-versa each user could have many addresses (think about someone trying to entangle his addresses in order to gain some degrees of privacy).
Addresses numbers are also used in some kind of Bitcoin valuations involving Metcalfe’s law, or a law trying do determine the value of a network, users being the asset of such network.
 
COMMENT: WOW, since last update active addresses have taken a plunge and nosedive to 480,000, a level not seen since endo of April, after having touched a maximum of around 650,000 at the beginning of last month.
Last month I was puzzled by the incoherent pictures of active addresses/mempool fees/daily transactions. This might be a clue of what's happening.
Given hash rate, difficulty, and daily transaction are going on the opposite direction I would say something happened at transaction-level. Maybe the coinjoin season has already finished? After a flurry of coinjoin rounds during last two months all the privacy has been regained? so there's not a flood of many inputs-many outputs (single) transactions? I haven't any evidence here, It might be worth investigating more.
 

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/bloba33c3a958fc72e08.jpeg

Source: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses?daysAverageString=7&timespan=180days

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Bitcoin is working for what it was meant for by Satoshi: BULLISH
Last month status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: Bitcoin is digital gold. This means that can serve an uncensorable store of value in now derailed regimes. As more and more government indulges in hopeless funding/money printing options, in many cases BTC is the only way to preserve the right to defend your own wealth against (hyper)inflation

In this section we usually analyse how bitcoin is used by citizens of disarray-nations trying to protect their own purchasing power against theft from central governments, either in the form of seizures, taxation of hyperinflation.

This month I will focus on how one of this very  "oppressive" government is turning to bitcoin just because it is uncensorable, borderless and ultimately... works.

Venezuela Turned Airport Taxes Into Bitcoin to Avoid Sanctions: Report (https://www.coindesk.com/venezuela-turned-airport-taxes-into-bitcoin-to-avoid-sanctions-report)


According to Coin.dance, volumes on P2P exchanges are stable, with slight improvements on exchanges requiring less stringent KYC procedures.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob6599712572e10059.jpeg

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob548c7c43d3e02829.jpeg

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob28c858daf4f3b0b4.jpeg

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NVT: BULLISH
Previous month Status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Network Value to Transaction (NVT) is defined as the Bitcoin Network Value over the Daily Transaction Volume and be interpreted for Bitcoin in the same way P/E ratio for a stock-market. More insight and details on the interpretation of such signal can be found in the resource links at the end of the post.


COMMENT: During Jul NTV reversed the course of action observed during last months and it is definitely pointing north. NTV ratio (not pictures here) is also bullish @69, still in the price positive region, well away from levels signalling downturn in markets or bubbles. Both indicators continue to signal an healthy price action for the moment.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobf2b377e64be040a9.jpeg

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Realized Cap: BULLISH
Previous Month: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: The realised cap attempts to improve the market cap by valuing different part of the Bitcoin supply at different prices, instead of using the daily close as market cap does: every coin, or more properly every UTXO is valued at the price of their creation. In a less technically correct explanation let’s say that  while Market Cap use the last traded price and multiplies it times by the coins in circulation, Realised Cap computes  the total value paid for each coin at the price they last moved on the blockchain. You can look at this indicator as an improvement to the market capitalisation, a very misleading indicator for crypto currencies, trying to capture the “true hodling value” of Bitcoin.


COMMENT: Lateral price movement during last month slowed the rise in realised cap. Probably fewer observed transactions also made realised value slowing growth. Market Cap is anyway a lot above realised cap, meaning we are still poised to a bullish environment: realised cap seems not shy to hit new AYH

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MVRV: NEUTRAL
Previous month: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: MVRV (Market Value to Realised Value Ratio) (https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-mvrv-ratio/) is an indicator was designed by David Puell and Murad Mahmudov and is simply the ratio of Market Cap / Realised Cap. It’s useful for getting a sense of when the exchange traded price is below “fair value” and is also quite useful for spotting market tops and bottoms.
Awe and Wonder, later revised MVRV with a z-score, the resulting MVRV-z provides a clearer picture of the market cycle with tops and bottoms normalising around common levels. Refer to linked Woobull website for an in-depth explanation.


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob3f10dab682d7695a.jpeg

COMMENT: During last month both indicator stabilised around 2.20 for the MRVR and  3.15 for the MRVR-3, confirming high levels, but still far from irrational exuberance and consolidating for further rises. Price consolidation is a welcome opportunity to re evaluate scenarios before going further up in an healthy movement not driven (only) by FOMO.

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USD Exchange Trade Volume: NEUTRAL
Previous month Status: NEUTRAL
Time Horizon: Medium Term

RATIONALE: Exchange traded futures are the closest instrument to Bitcoin Wall Street can touch to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. Provided the price will follow quite closely the Bitcoin price, or what can be observed in the relevant “walled gardens” used to settle the futures, what is interesting for us is the contract volumes, that can give us a few hints of the interest Wall Street has towards the digital gold.

COMMENT: Unsurprisingly, overall traded volumes are back to the low and stable volumes observed since a few months: this is , given price action:

 https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume?daysAverageString=7&timespan=2years

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob32fd7511c4a17575.jpeg

Bitcoin CME future volumes  (sum of all traded position) and Open Interests (net open positions on daily settlements) have experienced record after record during last month.  at CME (https://cryptonomist.ch/en/2019/06/28/new-historical-records-bitcoin-futures/), after CBOE settled last trade on his now defunct BTC future.

A few of interesting insight come from Cryptocompare Exchange Review June 2019 (https://www.cryptocompare.com/media/35651224/cryptocompare_exchange_review_2019_06.pdf). Even if data are a little bit outdated, we can draw up some thoughtful considerations.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc34ceec8b51a0d3f.jpeg

Bitcoin volumes in June have been stable, slightly decreasing from May, to 587 Billions USD, the vast majority of this trading is in fee regulated markets. Of this trading 69.4% is against  stablecoins, mostly USDT (97% of total stablecoins trading is in USDT).
 
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob48f09e9cc1e7ad0b.jpeg

Dex exchanges are stable, but still represent a tiny amount of total trading volumes. Total monthly trading in DEX has been only 126 Millions USD, representing only 0.02% of total volume. This is an hard limit for customers looking for liquidity, even in tiny sizes.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob3e9fd292983d6140.jpeg

Concerning derivatives markets Cryptocompare notes that:
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob9b803a6f9c7a8318.jpeg

On July 22, Bakkt initiated user acceptance testing for its bitcoin futures listed and traded at ICE Futures U.S. and cleared at ICE Clear US.
Apparently the tests were a huge success, unknown the metric for this statement. Still waiting for a clear production launch timeline.

On a surprising plot twist, coindesk reported that Beating Bakkt, LedgerX Is First to Launch ‘Physical’ Bitcoin Futures in US (http://)

Last note on derivatives on Bitfinex: we note that during last month short interest almost disappeared:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob6b638e3c9c6ba079.png

This poses a double scenario: or shorts have closed their position, getting closer to halving and given the positive momentum (bullish) or, in case of negative movements, there won't be any buyer (short closing their positions)  amplifying bearish movements because of longs being stopped out (bearish case). Which scenario will prevail?
Just as a reference i am posting here a recap of the costs for shorting bitcoins on the exchanges: this helps evaluate the short positioning

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob76ce8495b980d4cb.jpeg
Source: messsari.io

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Exchange Scrutiny: BULLISH
Previous month Status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

Rationale: exchanges are the weak link in the Bitcoin ecosystem: poor operations, subpar technologies, prone to frauds, scams and every kind of market rigging schemes (pump and dumps, market manipulations etc: basically every illicit operation banned in traditional financial markets since 20 years ago, to say the least). Every month news report of lost founds, hacked accounts, founder's frauds. Every news is a Darwin's push for the Bitcoin ecosystem toward a more efficient functioning.

COMMENT:Another busy month in the exchange world. Not only regulators are cracking down exchanges, with the already mentioned measures to enforce data sharing and compulsory KYC, but also general public is going to audit exchanges operations in order to protect their investments. Cryptocompare Exchange Benchmark we examined last month goes in this direction.

Of course part of user job is trying to discount publicly available information and select better exchanges.

Useful links:

• CryptoCompare Exchange Benchmark (https://blog.cryptocompare.com/why-cryptocompare-created-an-exchange-benchmark-a9f382c77e38)
  
• VB1001 is maintaining a list of Hacked Exchanges. This list is expanding month after month.
  List Exchanges Hacked 2011 / 2019 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5090869.0)
  

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobd9d129e9b82401b2.jpeg

Reading from Coinmetrics state of the network Newsletter wee learn that exchanges have been prone to market manipulations, again.

From the newsletter:

Of course Exchanges have little incentives to get rid of those schemes.
Given the bad review of market practice of "volume faking" fabricated via automatic trading, one might considered HFT has only negative consequences. Well, ErisX's Matthew Trudeau has a different view: automated trading and HFT are not faking volumes, but providing liquidity to markets, where ultimately customers can benefit from such activity: Crypto Exchanges Are Benefiting from Algorithmic Trading: Here’s How (https://www.coindesk.com/high-frequency-trading-and-colocation-in-the-digital-asset-space)

https://static.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/HFT-ed1-728x640.png

This is a long standing debate in regulated traditional finance, I suspect on wild roaring unregulated crypto- markets effect can have a very different twist. We will see in the coming future.

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HODL Waves: BULLISH
Previous month Status: BULLISH
Time Horizon: Long Term

RATIONALE: Bitcoin HODL Waves is a visualisation by Unchained Capital (https://blog.unchained-capital.com/bitcoin-data-science-pt-1-hodl-waves-7f3501d53f63), it shows the cross section of Bitcoin held in wallets grouped by the age since they last moved. The upper contours, represent supply (old coins that have remained unmoved) while the lower contours represent new demand (coins that have recently shifted). The composite view clearly shows each bull cycle bringing in new demand. This visualisation is useful for locating exactly where the market timing is during its long term oscillations between bull and bear phases.
TL,DR: The area Above each line is the amount of "coins" not moved since the relevant time horizon.

COMMENT: We have a few observations here. Firstly I would say that, broadly speaking, lines on the upper pat of the chat, the #stronghands, are hodling, 5y lines is at minimum levels since a long time and a lot of those lines are moving sharlòply downward, meaning long time hodlers are hodling. On the contrary , lines in the bottom part of the chart, apart the "trading" lines (12m, 6m and most notably, 3m) are moving up, meaning they are trading their BTC, #weakhands, as they are probably selling at loss aor for a small gain. As we said last month: #weakhands, once the price recovers and you are in the money with your trades, you want to get rid of those coins you bought. This is a decision you are going to regret in a short period of time!

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob00836f6aa1620615.jpeg

Last month I introduced a new index,  Bitcoin Average Dormancy (https://medium.com/adaptivecapital/bitcoin-average-dormancy-28f88ea4c2ce), as I haven't been able to find a real time source for this index, not to calculate it by myself, I am abiding any comment on this for this month. I will try harder!

Reading from Coinometrics State of the Network weekly newsletter Issue 9, we have a confirmation of what we empirically observed:

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BONUS SECTION:
FACEBOOK LIBRA: BULLISH

Well, this month in libra universe: Crickets and Tumbleweeds.

The good news is that the Congressional Hearings were more focused on FB privacy management and security stance (https://www.coindesk.com/watch-an-inside-look-at-libra-the-first-corporate-cryptocurrency), than actual Libra questioning. Also Mnuchin reaction was in this direction (https://www.coindesk.com/us-treasury-secretary-mnuchin-says-g7-in-agreement-on-libra-cryptocurrencies). Of course they are scared and not open to innovation in such a critical aspect, but I guess Libra executive are well prepared to this.
Later during the month Mnuching held a weird press conference on cryptocurrencies  (https://www.coindesk.com/us-treasury-secretary-mnuchin-is-not-comfortable-with-facebooks-libra)

Here, a nice infographic on how bitcoin relates to USD:
https://messari.s3.amazonaws.com/images/agora-images/lJXM2s2.jpg
https://messari.io/c/research/bitcoin-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things


Only important news is that apparently FB is not going to force a launch before g-man are fully GO with that, even postponing indefinitely Libra launch as per this Coindesk article:  Facebook Libra Might Never Launch, Company Concedes in SEC Disclosure (http://facebook-libra-might-not-ever-launch-concedes-firm)


Of course the stake is high, the market is huge so are the gains, no need to rush pissing off regulators.


Others Read:

• Website: https://calibra.com/
  
• White paper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/
• Github repository: https://github.com/libra
  
• Libra currently looks more like a fiat currency than a cryptocurrency (https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/19/libra-currently-looks-more-like-a-fiat-currency-than-a-cryptocurrency/)
  
• Libra, a Cyberpunk Nightmare in the Midst of Crypto Spring (https://hackernoon.com/libra-a-cyberpunk-nightmare-in-the-midst-of-crypto-spring-5543b6f6e34b)
  
• How Will Facebook’s Libra “Blockchain” Really Work?An expert guide to the social media company’s foray into cryptocurrency By Jameson Loop (https://medium.com/@lopp/thoughts-on-libra-blockchain-49b8f6c26372)
  
• An in-depth review of Facebook's long-anticipated entry into cryptocurrency (https://info.binance.com/en/research/marketresearch/libra.html)
  

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A few interesting reports:

• It’s the settlement assurances, stupid. How to evaluate blockchains (https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurances-stupid-5dcd1c3f4e41)
  
• Lightning Network Study. Will this technology become the new standard for Bitcoin transactions?  (https://datalight.me/blog/researches/lightning-network-study-will-this-technology-become-the-new-standard-for-bitcoin-transactions/)
  
• Pantera Blockchain Summit 2019 :: Blockchain Letter, July 2019 (https://medium.com/@PanteraCapital/pantera-blockchain-letter-july-2019-da863692065d)
  
• Commentary: Bitcoin energy use - mined the gap (https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2019/july/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap.html?utm_content=bufferb0360&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=bufferCommentary)
  
• Paradigm Shifts By Ray Dalio (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paradigm-shifts-ray-dalio/)
  
• Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) (https://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2019/cambridge-bitcoin-electricity-consumption-index-cbeci/)
  
• Bitcoin 2019 Investor Study (http://go.pardot.com/e/652383/gn-072519-btc-inv-study-non-in/6dxhb/103097959?h=rp5am15Ar4CJdlaL_HBcmh_3sM5zvmFQ334_kaj1ESA)
  
  
  
  Quote
  Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has steadily grown in popularity and today has expanded its reach to a broad mainstream audience. Now, a new joint survey from Grayscale Investments and Q8 Research provides a deeper level of insight into investors’ interests, perceptions, and misconceptions about investing in Bitcoin.
  
  Our Bitcoin: 2019 Investor Study findings cover:
  
  The profile of potential Bitcoin investors
  The messages that drive Bitcoin’s appeal
  Investor sentiment around Bitcoin vs. gold
  

Bitcoin Models reference list:

• Introducing NVT Ratio (Bitcoin's PE Ratio), use it to detect bubbles (https://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/)
  
• When did Bitcoin's investment era begin? A study using NVT. (https://woobull.com/bitcoins-early-investment-era-under-nvt-ratio/)
  
• Realized Cap (https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/)
  
• MVRV (https://blog.goodaudience.com/bitcoin-market-value-to-realized-value-mvrv-ratio-3ebc914dbaee)
  
• CME future (https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html)
  
• https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
  
• Average Dormancy (https://medium.com/adaptivecapital/bitcoin-average-dormancy-28f88ea4c2ce).
  

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As usual I would like to thanks everyone who contributed to this post, in particular the guys in the Bitcoin Pump! thread on the Italian board for invaluable exchange of ideas (Plutosky amongst the others) and help in keeping track of news, as well as the whole WO's family for moral support, entertainment. Special mention of the month goes to VB1001 that provided good content!

What are your thoughts?

awesome work fillippo!!

let me read that again..

My positive opinion is that by the end of August BTC will bounce from 8.500$ to this year ATH
And the 8.5k can be over/under 150$ max

You won. LOL. Yes, Bitcoin is bullish as we see. Despite these decreases which we hate so very much, BTC is constantly climbing up. It might happen that soon, in 3-5 months, it can reach 14 thousand or even more. In 2020, when Bitcoin halving takes place, this cryptocurrency will be even in the larger demand than now.
The price of 1 BTC can reach 20 thousand dollars in May 2020.

I guess that will make people sad if that will happens at the end of August because I think many people are buying bitcoin in more than $10k. They can be panic when they see the price is down especially if there is a flash dump that will happen in all market, and they will fast-selling the bitcoin to buy back again at a lower price. But I hope that although the price is down, it will not getting deeper than your prediction so bitcoin price can increase back to the higher rate.

I've obviously made a wrong prediction  8)
but, the scenario can be postponed for the end of September

In my opinion I am not aware of the news, I learned it from Jesse Livermore in his books, and only by looking at the market and studying it according to Wyckoff's theory, we are entering the bullish trend phase. Then I would say that it is imperative to have accumulated BTC.

You are more or less doing like a guessing work then because if your analysis was right then at least we should have been a little bit closer to your prediction, it is not easy though to make accurate analyses as regards this very volatile market and I think that we just need to suspend predicting for now, all we just have to know is that bitcoin will grow on future, and it is on that base that we should hold on to and then prepare for that moment by investing now.

I believe that bitcoin will become more bullish next year and for the remaining part of this year, we may not so much have more than just stable prices, maybe we will then peak at $12k, then pick up from that point next year  till after that halving, which I think that is where the major bull is starting from.

Guys,
As I am on holidays, away from any decent editing device and without the possibility to concentrate for writing this report.
So I am sadly announcing this month the report won’t be updated. Sorry but I try to keep an elevated standard and for the past two weeks I haven’t been able to follow all the developments and write the report.
Bests,
Filippone

Have a good "late" ferragosto and fill Your batteries as more as You can  ;)