2014 has been a very troubled year for bitcoin. There have been some twists and difficult situations that have endangered the digital currency health and launched distrust among investors. Nevertheless, it also has been a year of teaming activity pledged with a steady and constant entry of new users and many businesses accepting bitcoin. The fast and progressive implantation of bitcoin has lead to the appearance of a whole new set of industries and services operating within the ecosystem. It seems that a year in our time set, can become several “bitcoin years”; in fact, 2014 has seen more development in bitcoin than the past years altogether since 2009.
In the final round of 2013, we witnessed the first bubble, when bitcoin reached its high price of $1200, but soon after MTGox, the price entered a free fall reaching a low price of $375. The volatile instance of bitcoin made it reach values that no one could have guessed and now with the increase of financial interest and confidence, bitcoin is in a rapid ascension to mass adoption.
Although the price of bitcoin has been stuck to a downtrend for some time now, its growth, on the other hand seems to be unstoppable. For traders, this can be explained through a technical analysis using well known indicators like MACD, StochRSI, EMA, SRA, etc. The indicators can be of much help for day traders, but for our analysis approach we’ll present only five simple but meaningful indicators in which we can observe the strong growth direction of bitcoin:
Traffic for popular bitcoin sites, namingly: bitcointalk, blockchain and Coinbase
Growth is undeniably impressive for bitcointalk, blockchain and coinbase. It also lines up perfectly with what you would expect to see from “number of transactions excluding popular addresses” and “number of unique bitcoin addresses used”.
Transactions; number of transactions excluding popular addresses (1 year, 7 day average) and number of bitcoin addresses used (1 year, 7 day average)
Many users say these two indicators are probably faked since it’s easy to create new addresses and send coins back and forth. These data would seem to contradict that theory. Therefore, I have no reason to believe transaction volume is being faked. It is to notice that “number of unique addresses” is approaching the high reached during the late 2013 / early 2014 bubble.
Google trends; ranging google trends in the web and google trend in youtube (90 days)
Google trends are one of the indicators that more and more searches are being done regarding bitcoin. Recently the country with the major spike was Argentina.
Tweets; regarding bitcoin tweets in 30 days.
The number of tweets related to bitcoin and crypto currencies has doubled this year
Exchanges;
Exchanges are a very good indicator of popularity. Exchanges can provide significant information about the health of bitcoin and the popularity of the digital currency in a given country.
Here’s a list of the most popular exchanges:
1. btc-e (4,204)
2. Bitstamp (10,918)
3. Kraken (32,708)
4. OKCoin (36,342)
5. Bitfinex (51,326)
6. Huobi (66,436)
7. BTC China (71,968)
Btc-e is by far the biggest exchange in terms of site traffic. Mostly all slavic traffic too. Nevertheless, it’s possible to see north american exchanges taking over Btc-e terrain.
After doing some analysis over this we can consider, Eastern Europe to be a much bigger deal than China.
Chinese traffic looks oddly inconsistent and not what it would have been expected. This is probably due to not having access to much Chinese traffic data.
No surprises looking at demographic info. Bitcoin enthusiasts are almost 100% men with high education.
All exchanges have seen a recent uptick after a prolonged decline following the bubble bust.
Overall it looks like the worlds interest in cryptocurrency is growing stronger. Traffic for popular sites has been growing; the number of tweets and google trends related to bitcoin has doubled and we have seen the number of bitcoin transactions and new addresses growing at full pace. We’re almost back at the level of interest experienced during the last “bubble”. Probably we’re just about due for another spike in interest.
Photo source 1:amongtech
Photo source 2:nxtbitcoin
Photo source 3:blockchain