Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Lack of retail interest indicates increased institutional flow into Bitcoin
by
d5000
on 21/08/2019, 18:52:13 UTC
⭐ Merited by timerland (1)
Great article
At the contrary, I consider this article a bad one. Almost "Bitcoin.com" level Grin

It parts from a Google Trends observation as an indicator for "retail interest", which is highly speculative. First, Google searches for Bitcoin are often related to speculation by Average Joes, not to cryptocurrency usage in the retail sector. They may however use the word "retail" in the sense of "small investors".

But not even the Google Trends observation is really correct. As we can see in the chart displayed in the article, the interest in Bitcoin is growing, and at a pretty good pace (it has aproximately doubled in comparison to late 2018). In 2017, Bitcoin's bubble (and the subsequent crash) was in all the media, and that explains the very short (1-2 months) spike in the Google Trends chart. Most people probably didn't search for it because of genuine interest in investing or using it but instead simply because everybody was talking about it and they wanted to know what it was about.

Then we have tweets about "institutional investors" as an indication for interest in Bitcoin. Well. Specialized Bitcoin "institutional" investors (like Grayscale) have existed since at least 2013. And their nice numbers, measured in US dollars, are mostly growing because the BTC prices are rising. The only item supporting their theory is the Bitcoin engagement by Fidelity, which was ... last year (as they also write, but it doesn't support their theory at all).

As a conclusion, I think the connection they draw between "retail" and "institutional" investors is extremely speculative.