Biggest BTC/Altcoin trend in 2019 - in hindview - and it will continue

[telcobert]

In retrospect, 2019 was the year when Bitcoin resumed its conceptual leadership in Crypto, despite being the oldest of the bunch. This shows again the stroke of genius Bitcoin was and still is.

Why? The heaviest secondary cryptos (Ethereum, Ripple, and Cash) began to trade in lockstep with Bitcoin. The chart nicely shows their correlations consistently at around 0.7 to 0.8 from Jan 2019 onwards. Amazingly, the quite different narratives of XRP and ETH correlated highest 0.85.

What does it mean? This indicates that the different stories have been pretty much fully digested by the market's collective intelligence, the uncertainty around Bitcoin Cash resolved quite quickly from the fork in early 2018. Now in 2020, the cryptoshere is back to its roots: it hinges on their common denominator, Bitcoin's utility and success. This reminds me of 2015 when the market finally had priced in the expectations and insights for Litecoin.

What's next? I predict this will high correlation will continue in 2020, until such time as a new altcoin with an entirely new, major thought model will emerge.

Static image: https://imgur.com/a/jsWb7H9
Dynamic: https://coinmetrics.io/correlations/#assets=btc-ltc,btc-xrp,bch-btc,bch-eth,bch-xrp,eth-xrp_period=360

[asriloni]

The market can't be dictated with the only correlation between bitcoin and whole of altcoins. As the market trend is determined by how good the trend that happened with any coin as bitcoin will be only dictating altcoin when it was getting the major bearish or bullish trend. Basically, it's not good to see altcoin has a very strong correlation as the altcoin can't dictate its own price and this has already proved so many times if the fact that altcoin needs to stand without depends on the bitcoin.
The correlation between bitcoin and altcoin will continue but it will not always bring a good result.

[telcobert]

Basically, it's not good to see altcoin has a very strong correlation as the altcoin can't dictate its own price.

A value judgement - what's good or not - depends on one's own perspective. My point was not about price trends (I don't care much about altcoins) it was about correlation trends. And the correlation trends show a moment of truth in the altcoin mess, double supported with evidence of Bitcoin resuming dominance.

The chart nicely supports that Satoshi was right when he wrote, 10 years ago:

I wanted to design it to support every possible transaction type I could think of.  (...) The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types. (...) I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. 

Which from my perspective is "good".