In this 🧵, I'll take an in-depth look at several on-chain metrics to explore where we are in the cycle, what market players are currently (not) selling, how this impacts the current market supply and speculate where we might be heading
2/18 I'll start by looking at the #Bitcoin Price Temperature (BPT) to get a feel for how hot current prices are in the context of its 4-year cycle
In short; prices have heated up quickly, but the 🌡️ has consolidated just below the BPT6 Band - just like we saw in 2017
3/18 If you look at popular on-chain metrics that are often used to assess the overall #Bitcoin market cycle, you get a similar picture; we're well underway in this cycle's 🐂 market - but are not at prior-cycle-top levels yet
5/18 Combine the previous tweet with a finding by @woonomic earlier this month that based on the low average coin dormancy of the moved coins, and we get a more clear picture; it appears that particularly young whales were selling (or 'profit taking')
6/18 So what are the other key market participants currently doing?
In March, the amount of #bitcoin that was sent from miners to exchanges has declined steeply to levels that we haven't seen all of last year, suggesting that the miners are not enticed to sell at current prices
7/18 This tweet by @michael_saylor is interesting to consider in the current context. Are current miners indeed so well-capitalized that they can afford to keep their mined coins & actually buy extra by taking a similar strategy as @MicroStrategy? 👀
According to this chart shared by @WClementeIII, the HODL'ers are also increasingly keeping their cards against their chests, also showing a pattern of hesitance to sell at current prices - just like the miners
9/18 This chart by @whale_map that shows the on-chain volumes of HODL'ers confirms the picture that was suggested in the previous tweet: since the January local top, long-term HODL'er on-chain activity has been in a decreasing trend
10/18 One last bit of confluence on this point can be found in @_Checkmatey_'s excellent analysis in @glassnode's weekly newsletter, showing that the amount of 'coin days destroyed' since the January local top has been in a steady decline
11/18 The 2020 decline in the amount of #bitcoin on exchange has been much discussed
Since passing the $14k level in Nov, this decline has flattened - but started steepening again in March, illustrating that the growing miner and HODL'er hesitance is starting to impact markets
12/18 The significance of this current decline in exchange balances in comparison to the rest of this 🐂 run so far is quite clear in this chart of the changes in liquid supply shared by @WClementeIII
13/18 To reiterate the previous points; so many coins moving into the illiquid supply means that these #bitcoin are moving into the hands of strong HODL'ers with diamond hands 💎
1) The current consolidation looks to be young whales taking profits 🐳
2) Miners and HODL'ers appear to be increasingly hesitant to sell at current prices 🔒
3) The supply on exchanges is still declining and is moving into strong hands 💪
Conclusion: 🔥
15/18 Due to #Bitcoin's perfectly inelastic supply that cannot be expanded at will, if no one would sell at current price levels, the price level must go up to entice current holders to actually sell their coins if demand remains (e.g., DCA) or increases (new market participants)
16/18 We know all about the DCA-club, but where could new market demand for #bitcoin come from?
) will start offering their wealthiest clients #bitcoin investment products 👀
17/18 An even more bullish perspective would be new demand coming from governments considering to start putting #bitcoin in their treasuries
...which appears to be exactly what NYDIG CEO Robby Gutmann is hinting at here 👀
18/18 To finish off, if these developments are indeed bullish, where is #bitcoin going next?
I don't have a crystal ball or perfect model ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), but tend to look at the combination of the following models as a range of potential outcomes:
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2/11 Money can be defined as "the most salable good to transfer value across space and time"
#Bitcoin can be seamlessly transferred across both space and time thanks to its digital nature and 21-million maximum supply
3/11 When valuing #bitcoin, those aspects need to be taken into account
Some models focus on scarcity (e.g., @100trillionUSD's S2F models), whereas others may look at its transactional capacity (e.g., @woonomic's Network-Value-to-Transactions (NVT) Price model)
2/5 The first concept to grasp is that of Realized Value (RV), introduced by @nic__carter & @khannib in 2018
RV is the total value of all circulating coins at the last time they moved on-chain, therefore representing the estimated cost-base of all existing #bitcoin
3/5 Briefly after, @kenoshaking & @MustStopMurad divided the total #bitcoin Market Value (MV) by the RV, creating a groundbreaking metric called the MVRV Ratio
A pseudonym called Awe and Wonder then iterated upon it by standardizing it ((MV-RV)/MVsd), creating the MVRV Z-Score
2/17 Last year, @Glassnode learned that when an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) is >155 days old, its has a relatively low probability of being spent
Based on this, they created Short-Term Holder (STH) and Long-Term Holder (LTH) supply metrics
3/17 If you divide @glassnode's LTH supply by the circulating #bitcoin supply, you get a LTH Supply Ratio that quantifies the portion of the supply that is estimated to belong to LTHs
LTHs tend to sell against market strength (🟥) and accumulate during market weakness (🟩)
2/22 Since mid-April, China came down hard on #Bitcoin, banning its institutions to offer #bitcoin services, censoring related search results and shutting down mining operations in recent weeks
Hash rate dropped ~50%, to levels not seen since briefly after last year's halving 🤕
3/22 A result of the hash rate drop is that #Bitcoin blocks are coming in much slower than the usual 10 minute block intervals
In fact; block creation slowed down to more than twice the intended interval & levels not seen in >11 years, illustrating the magnitude of this drop 🤯
1/25 @BitcoinMagazine just posted the first edition of a new monthly series titled 'Cycling On-Chain', in which on-chain and price-related data are used to estimate where in #Bitcoin's market cycle we are
2/25 Just like the periods after the 2012 and 2016 halvings, the 2020 #Bitcoin halving created a supply shock that triggered an exponential price increase
However, compared to the previous one, this cycle got heated much faster 🥵
3/25 When the #bitcoin price ran towards and beyond its previous (2017) all-time high at $20k, market participants increasingly started to secure profits
After the January local top, this profit-taking has been decreasing - despite price still grinding up until recently
1/7 Just published an article at @BitcoinMagazine that uses on-chain data visualizations to explain how #Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment mechanism works & how it relates to hash rate, block intervals, fees & the mempool
2/7 #Bitcoin reaches its 21 million hard cap by starting with a 50 BTC block subsidy and halving that each 210k blocks, until the block subsidy falls away after 33 halvings
#Bitcoin needs block intervals of ~10 min to ensure these halvings are spread out over ~4 years. But why?
3/7 If #Bitcoin had a fixed difficulty, it would have had an adoption threshold if it started high, or quickly run through its supply issuance schedule if it started low
Relatively stable block interval times are needed to spread out miner incentives & ensure stable throughput