Back in the summer of 2015, one tracked the euphoria of the Chinese stock market bubble by the number, usually in the hundreds of thousands, of new brokerage accounts that were opened on any one given day.
And while that bubble has long since burst, the tradition of measuring new account openings has remained, and nowhere more so than in the biggest momentum instruement of the day, bitcoin.
Following a 7x increase in the price of bitcoin this year alone, which earlier today topped $7,000 for the first time ever (before sliding as much as $600) the broader public is now truly on board, and as one of the world's biggest US cryptocurrency exchanges reports in its daily usage update, there were 11.9 million Coinbase users as of November 1, shortly after the CME announced it would introduce bitcoin futures by the end of 2017.
This number is notable because according to data collected by Alistair Milne, an investor in the Atlanta Digital Currency fund...
... the number of users was 11.8 million yesterady, meaning that in one day Coinbase added a record 100,000 users, i.e., bitcoin traders.
Such a parabolic shift into bitcoin will likely raise some eyebrows, not least because as
Bloomberg reports, Coinbase’s GDAX platform drew scrutiny from the CFTC last month over the June 21 flash crash that erased most of the value of ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, in a matter of milliseconds.
And another consideration: Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, who has previously called for bitcoin to hit $6,000 by the middle of 2018 and $25,000 by 2022, today turned cautious after the recent rally "on contemporaneous fundamentals."
The uberbitcoinbull says the 60% surge in the past month to over $7,000 is a result of multiple factors, including CME announcement to offer futures on bitcoin and Amazon acquiring crypto domains. As a result he recommends waiting for a pullback, and buying bitcoin in the $5,500 range. He is less concerned about the long-run, however, and sees the cryptocurrency hitting $25,000 by 2022.
...
The growth of bitcoin's underlying metrics is one of the best arguments for it not being a bubble. More than 100,000 new users per day is a decent statistic implying growth. Hopefully there will be a follow up article in the future with more information if coinbase is willing to release data on how many of those 100k new accounts are active, how many bought crypto and what percentage were accounts that were created to satisfy someone's curiosity about what the GUI and UX experience was like.
Part of bitcoin's uptrend in price could be linked to arbitrage plays across
http://golix.io (african exchange) where btc hit a high of $13,000. If african exchanges are legitimate, it could be possible to sell bitcoin for $12,000 on golix.io then cashout in fiat. Then use that fiat to buy bitcoin @ $7,000 on other exchanges. Move bitcoin back to golix.io to sell for $12,000. That type of inter exchange arbitrage could be one of the best strategies when it actually works.
