..aaaand, we’re back at it again — a misbehaving bitcoin price. Sunday evening bitcoin flash-crash dipped a red candle the size of Jupiter; and more eerily, it kept dropping down on Monday morning, touching below $111,000.
Now, around here in the land of bitcoin price therapy, we say that nobody knows why prices move. But sometimes, we do… though not as well as we would like. Today, I discuss two things: the last 24 hours’ worth of shenanigans and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s remarks late last week.
An Unruly Bitcoin Price
Late Sunday (European time) was pretty disgusting:
It’s hard to say “nobody knows” when a chart looks like that; somebody knows what happened to plunge the bitcoin price some 3,000 in a matter of minutes. If it’s not a specific macro event, like last week, the only thing eating through order books like this are a) massive orders, and — what amounts to the same thing — b) mass liquidations.
Yesterday, there was some indication of both:
or…
This is an underdeveloped market, and it’s ridiculous how small we are and how illiquid the bitcoin market is: still able to get wacked around by individual market actors. (As always in Bitcoinland, there is some schmuck willing to turn a verifiably bad thing into a good thing.)
The 2.5% instant drop in bitcoin price last night might be a one-off due to a whale selling or some liquidations, but the gradual, diagonally down movement during the night and Monday morning (bitcoin price crashing below $111,000) is much more worrying. Ignore the big, noisy whale… wth is happening? Why are we slowly dying when we should be winning, son!
All the macro arrows of the world are pointing in the right direction: Why is the bitcoin price trading down, in this range, when any sane assessment puts it double or triple from here…? (And no, we didn’t drop below $111,000 as or because or in relation whatsoever to Metaplanet announcing buys).
Price does whatever it wants; shitcos do whatever they please.
Bitcoin price therapy definitely needed: Bitcoin price just does whatever it wants, with no regard for sanity or rational assessment. Not a care in the world for the most bullish of bullish circumstances. Maximum pain, I’ve heard it said. Not even Saylor’s million-dollar-cost averaging made much of a dent:
One of these magic tea leaves reading techniques (128-day moving average), tells us our Bitcoin Magazine Pro team today, is at $108,500… so we’ll probably go there. Saylor et al have already sold their kidneys and chairs, so I wonder what’s left.
More interesting/terrifying is that it keeps falling afterwards, hitting new lows. Our most scoop-like explanation is that all of these shitcos — of which Mr. Bailey, the owner of BTC Inc, runs one, having recently incinerated some $41 million — gobbling up all these coins during the spring couldn’t hold on to them and are now burping them back out again; some, in liquidation-infested red candles, and others in slow, grindy, time-weighted price.
A certain Cypherpunk OG seems aware of the structure:
Bitcoin Price and Powell’s Bowel
Sometimes we actually (sort of) do know what happened in markets — like last week, Aug 22, at 10 am Eastern: Released on Fed website was the statement/upgrade to Fed’s monetary policy framework. It was widely interpreted as future easing of monetary policy in the cards. How do we know this? Because every (hard) asset jump on the minute, and the dollar index fell:
- 9:59:49…bitcoin price = $112,393, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro’s chart.
- 10:00:49, one minute later, it’s 113459…
- a few minutes after that, we hit 115,000, bitcoin price rising 2.3% on the news.
This is the kind of shit that moves markets, and the instant, large moves make us pretty confident that THIS is the cause.
(for reference: 9.59, DXY = 98.7; two minutes later, 98.15; another minute, 97.8. That’s 1%, in a blink… That’s a big move for the DXY!)
Now we’ve located the source — Powell’s speech and/or the release of the statement. Which bit of his statement is what shocked markets so?
What happens on releases like this — or inflation numbers or unemployment by BLS — is that simple trading algorithms scrape the websites for instant updates and make a split-second assessment, often with second-order trading effects following. The move itself often get reversed ten, twenty, thirty minutes later when human and intelligent assessment have gotten involved. It was all a nothingburger, after all. That wasn’t the case this time, as the bitcoin price traded high over the weekend (until someone ruined the fun on Sunday…).
Powell’s statements last week revealed that
- inflation is a little elevated, but under control and coming down
- GDP growth had slowed markedly
- unemployment was steady and balanced (but “a curious kind of balance” where both supply and demand fall together) → risks altogether up.
- …and they’ll scrap this entire mistaken idea of average inflation target (over some time period nobody ever specified).
“In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside, and risks to employment to the downside — a challenging situation”
Yet Powell concluded that those risks “may warrant adjusting our policy stance.”
In the minutes and hours after the speech and the release of the statement, bitcoin price peaked at $117,000, before falling back to $116,000; that’s market participants dissecting and assessing, organically, what this new state means.
Here’s where my “Nobody knows why” take still holds: Nobody knows which part of Powell’s statement mattered, since new information is always mixing and merging with the expectation market participants had going in — and we can only rarely tell what those were. What we’re doing when we’re playing these catch-up, ad hoc, after-the-case explanations is playing post-rationalization games. Not that impressive.
Altogether pathetic. We need Bitcoiners rich and flourishing, not impoverished and distraught.
Bitcoin price therapy out. See you all in Hong Kong for Bitcoin Asia.
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