The recent action in Bitcoin probably makes it relatively easy for the media to write stories about the currency. For some time now, we have consistently seen titles on Bitcoin’s sequence of all-time high and sometimes the move up is linked to the denial of a proposed change in the network, called SegWit2x. In an article on CNBC, we read:
Bitcoin hit a fresh all-time high Monday above the $8,000 mark after a wild week for the cryptocurrency.
On Monday around 12:25 p.m. London time, it hit a record high of $8,121.56, according to data from industry website CoinDesk. Bitcoin first broke the $8,000 handle on Sunday.
The rally comes on the back of a huge sell-off on Sunday, November 12, where the price of bitcoin fell to around $5,500. That low, to the record high on Sunday, marks a more than 47 percent increase in the cryptocurrency’s price.
Bitcoin’s price dip last weekend came after a proposed upgrade to the bitcoin network, SegWit2x, which was planned for November 16, was called off. The aim was to increase the transaction speeds of bitcoin, which has increasingly slowed down over the years. If the upgrade had taken place, it would have caused what is known as a “hard fork,” causing a new bitcoin spin-off to be formed.
As usually, we are deeply skeptical of claims that “Bitcoin went up because of X” where X can be any one of the following: SegWit, fork, China, or any other piece of news for that matter. This is not to say that some moves in Bitcoin are caused, at least to some extent, by real-world developments. It is to say that more often than not it is very hard to pin down the links and at least sometimes the media seem to be clutching at straws. For instance, imagine that Bitcoin didn’t go up but rather went down heavily following the SegWit decision. A story along the lines of: “Bitcoin investors expected to get more coins in the process of forking but the split isn’t happening, the new coins are not created and people are getting out of longs.” Bitcoin, however, has gone up since the SegWit news came out. It might be the case that there was a bearish influence from the lack of split but it was absolutely overwhelmed by buying for different reasons. In this context, the lack of decline following the lack of split could have been viewed as a bullish hint. The point here is that the “reasons” you are likely to read about in the mainstream media are not necessarily the main drivers of a given move. Sometimes, they can be but that’s not a given. One indisputable fact is that Bitcoin is at a new all-time high once again.
