The flip side of Bitcoin’s $10,000 price breakout: Ordinary people don’t seem interested

On February 9 and 10, the price of Bitcoin finally broke through $10,000, driving a general rise in cryptocurrencies. This round of market was mainly driven by the inertial optimism of the halving, and can also be regarded as a short-term event.

In terms of trends, Jiang Zhuoer's logic of "looking at God in the short term and the number of users in the long term" is still very reasonable. From the perspective of Hayek and Friedman, the currency has evolved from shells, gold to paper, largely because it is a commonly recognized trading tool, or a consensus, or even a "story" as Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari said.

In other words, the more people agree with this "story", the greater the probability of use, and then the price rises and the market value increases. There are multiple levels of recognition: attention, recognition, purchase, and recommendation. However, from the perspective of various indexes, the attention to Bitcoin has not increased.

China is a major country holding cryptocurrency. Let’s first look at the WeChat Index:

(Bitcoin WeChat Index)

WeChat index shows that the attention to Bitcoin has been on a downward trend since November last year. It rebounded on February 9, but did not reach the "median line" of the index. The indexes of Weibo, Baidu and other Chinese websites have not changed significantly in the past six months.

(Bitcoin Google Index)

The Google Index also reached its peak when the price of Bitcoin reached $13,000 in the first half of last year. However, when the price of Bitcoin broke through $10,000 in the past few days , it did not show any special changes, and it was far from the high point in June last year.

Although many large institutions entered the market in 2019, insiders revealed that data from major exchanges showed that the number of new users grew very slowly in 2019. People in the cryptocurrency circle will also have a similar feeling that there are not many new entrants, and most of them are old cryptocurrency players playing together.

In mainland China's severe crackdown on cryptocurrency transactions, a very important step was the collective entry of propaganda departments, from focus interviews to media at all levels, which led to the stigmatization of cryptocurrency and made it difficult to attract new members to the currency circle.

The US regulation has also become stricter, and benchmark projects such as Libra and GRAM have been under heavy pressure and progress has been slow. The attitudes of the world's two largest economies, the United States and China, have also led to the fact that the development of cryptocurrency will not be as rapid as expected.

If we look at the global Bitcoin search volume, we will find that Nigeria ranks first, South Africa ranks second, and Ghana ranks fifth. Similar to China skipping the PC era and directly entering the mobile Internet, the cryptocurrency community is also looking forward to Africa, where only 11% of the population has bank accounts, skipping traditional finance and directly entering the crypto-finance era. However, Africa's economic size and population/investor numbers are still too small.

In summary, in the short term, the sentiment brought about by the historical experience of halving will indeed lead to a small bull market for cryptocurrencies as a whole. However, the acceptance of more users and the promotion of benchmark projects are the cornerstones of medium- and long-term development. At present, everything is not optimistic.