Woobull

Supply Shock, predicting price by quantifying intent to buy and sell

IntroductionIn any market, price is driven by demand and supply. This is a fundamental. The most obvious way of seeing this is in the bid and asks between buyers and sellers. A more nuanced way would be to wave a magic wand and gauge the intent of investors before the

Markets

The two types of Altcoins, an investor's view

This is a thread on altcoins, first published on Twitter. Altcoins are nuanced. We have: Protocol coinsUtility tokensSecurity tokensNon-fungible tokensBut to an investor, there's only 2 types. Oscillators and Degenerators. You can spot them on this chart of the entire market. The vast majority of alt-coins are Degenerators. Their price

Research

Introducing the Difficulty Ribbon, signaling the best times to buy Bitcoin

Introducing the Bitcoin Difficulty Ribbon. When the ribbon compresses, or flips negative, these are the best times to buy Bitcoin. The ribbon consists of simple moving averages on mining difficulty so we can easily see the rate of change in difficulty. How it the Difficulty Ribbon worksThis visualisation of network

Research

When did Bitcoin's investment era begin? A study using NVT.

For those familiar with NVT Ratio, the data from the early years comes off very skewed, sometimes written off as noisy rubbish data. To answer the mystery of early NVT moonage, come with me on a trip down memory lane and visit the transactional data of Bitcoin's early years. How

Research

Experiments on Cumulative Destruction

Two approaches to bring bitcoin-days-destroyed into the price domainOkay, so this article is now well overdue given the recent price action. BTC never rests! The last few months have been very productive in terms of discovering new valuation metrics based on on-chain analytics. The recent proposals using coindays destroyed by

Research

Why does on-chain volume show an overly bearish picture of the 2018-2019 Bitcoin market?

Let's delve into a mystery of this 2018-2019 bear market that David Puell and Murad Mahmudov and I have been exploring for months... Why does on-chain volume look so bearish while many of our other (to be published) metrics tell a more positive story? Up to now, whenever you saw

Markets

On peak indecisiveness

Summing Bitfinex's margin BTCUSD long and short positioning charts gives us an indication of speculator decisiveness. You can pull this chart up on TradingView with "BTCUSDLONGS+BTCUSDSHORTS". To be clear this is a view into speculator margin trade activity, in essence the volume they are borrowing from funders in order

Infographic

Fees paid to Bitcoin miners by year

If the Bitcoin network was a payments startup this chart would track its annual sales. Total fees paid to miners by year: 2010: $3.8k 2011: $33k 2012: $66k 2013: $2.2m 2014: $2.5m 2015: $2.3m 2016: $13.6m 2017: $555m 2018: $296m

Utility is a red herring, look for organic store of value

This article was first tweeted in short form on 9th Jan 2019. Store of value properties is what gives crypto networks value, utility is overrated for the purposes of investment appreciation. Utility is a red herring for investors. In the case of Bitcoin, its real utility is really just a

Markets

Why HODL?

Why HODL? It allows you to capture the gains of the market. Trading lets you beat it. In that zero-sum game, 10% of participants win, 90% lose. Are your skills in the top 10%? If not and you're still winning it's due to luck. Unfortunately being on the right side

Markets

Overheard in a chatroom: Forecasting vs predicting

I think of TA [technical analysis and charting that traders do] in exactly this forecast context. Veteran traders like Peter Brandt are forecasters. He's had decades of trading, he's removed much of his personal bias. He looks at chart setups more objectively.

Altcoins

When it's time to rebalance your crypto-assets in your portfolio

I think rebalancing a crypto portfolio to reduce exposure to a single crypto-asset is the most intuitive yet completely wrong move long term investors make. Maybe your portfolio starts off nice and balanced and may look something like this... Maybe ICO “C” is that coin you bought only because your

Signals

NVT Signal, a new trading indicator to pick tops and bottoms

NVT Ratio is a new valuation indicator that I introduced last year based on network fundamentals, namely value flowing through the blockchain. I was delighted to find Dmitry Kalichki created a much more responsive variation which I've been calling NVT Signal. What is NVT Signal? Standard NVT Ratio is simply

Bitcoin

My thoughts on Bitcoin's network congestion

Here's a wee chart below to illustrate my thoughts on Bitcoin's transactional network the last two years. The Bitcoin network hasn’t been able to keep up with peak transactional demand since 2016, since 2017 it hasn’t been able to keep up with the AVERAGE transactional demand. Meanwhile our

Bitcoin

The state of crypto-markets Q4, 2017

Preface: Last week I spoke in front of an audience of 1000 fund managers, bankers, and private equity folk in New York City at the inaugural Concensus Invest conference organised by CoinDesk. Here are my slides and commentary. Special thanks to CoinDesk for making the day possible. I don’t

Infographic

The 10,000 year view of Cryptocurrency [infographic]

Bankers say it's a Bubble. Technologist say it's Disruption. Students of history say it's the Dawn of the Digital Age. This is my 10,000 year view of cryptocurrency in one infographic.

Research

Introducing NVT Ratio (Bitcoin's PE Ratio), use it to detect bubbles

Preface February of this year, I tweeted a chart that presented the idea of a PE ratio for Bitcoin, something I temporarily called MTV Ratio before my buddy Chris Burniske suggested the less confusing term of NVT Ratio (Network Value[1] to Transactions Ratio). Later in May, Chris was the

Infographic

Segwit already making a difference to Bitcoin scaling [infographic]

Here's a sequel infographic to my last one showing the Bitcoin Network under congestion. After one month of Segwit activation, 4% of transactions on the Bitcoin Network is using the new protocol. It's already having an impact. Congestion is now down to early 2016 levels and dropping rapidly as more

Infographic

Bitcoin's scaling debate deadlock fueling an altcoin bubble [infographic]

I’ve put together this infographic to help explain the 8x bubble that altcoins has seen in the last two months. Two words: Scaling Debate. Bitcoin’s scaling deadlock has not resolved and transactions on its network are now at full capacity without a clear resolution in the near future.

Bitcoin

Determining the ideal block size for Bitcoin, a story of three graphs

One benefit of seeing congestion this early in Bitcoin’s life is we get a great set of data of the network under load. In this study, we’ll take a look at Bitcoin’s transactional data to see if it points to an ideal blocksize, if there is such a thing.

Bitcoin

Using Google Trends to detect Bitcoin price bubbles, and best times to buy

I wrote previously that Google Trends on the search term “BTC USD” is a great way to track the growth of active Bitcoin users. The search “BTC USD” is a proxy for the engagement of active Bitcoin users as they check the daily price. In the chart above, the baseline

Bitcoin

Bitcoin users double every 12 months

Google Trends is my friend. It’s a great tool for reporting search trends over time, and I’ve seen many people publish Trend’s charts of the search term “Buy Bitcoin”, to track Bitcoin’s interest by the public over time. I thought I’d use this tool to

Bitcoin

Estimated price impact from a Bitcoin ETF

This infographic of Bitcoin’s price is something I’ve been pondering today. It tells Bitcoin’s often dramatic price story in fundamental trend lines on top of which lives some serious doses of speculative activity. There’s a lot in this chart so lets break it down. In late

Bitcoin

Three cats and a moon - a data driven analysis of Bitcoin trader psychology for predictive price signalling

Here at Woobull Labs we take data driven analysis very seriously. Today, I’m pleased to present the culmination of 4 years of data gathering and analysis on Bitcoin trader psychology. The sketch above depicts the basic rig we used for our epic research. The dataset includes readings over 4

Research

Estimating the true Bitcoin trading volumes in China, a data-driven approach

Today Chinese exchanges report 98% of global volume. This shows huge dominance by Chinese markets. Unfortunately we know that most of this volume is fake. Why is it fake? Unlike the rest of the world, Chinese exchanges are unique in that they do not charge fees on trades. Instead they