Yesterday’s price crash does not seem to have affected bitcoin’s medium-term trend.
After three consecutive weeks of prices consistently above $55,000, yesterday it plunged from around $60,000 to below $53,000 in a matter of minutes, only to recover shortly thereafter.
Within an hour it was back down to $55,000 and then slowly climbed back up over the course of the day to $57,000.
Santiment pointed out that at the very moment of the sudden and rapid collapse, the social networks exploded with “buy the dip” and “bought the dip” comments.
📉🤑📈 The crowd appears to be confident that #Bitcoin's dip to $53.3k earlier today was nothing more than a small bump in the road. Our data indicates #buythedip mentions peaked on the small correction, while #boughtthedip peaked on the major one Sunday. https://t.co/Vz2FYd3hke pic.twitter.com/PCtfkWcbe8
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) April 18, 2021
Moreover, the peak of the ‘buy the dip’ posts occurred before the real crash started, i.e. when the price had just begun to fall, while the peak of the ‘bought the dip’ posts occurred just before the price fell below $53,000.
According to Santiment, this data suggests that people remain confident in Bitcoin, and that yesterday’s drop was “just a little bump in the road”.
If this is the case, then it would seem that yesterday’s drop was not able to make a real dent in bitcoin’s trend.
The trend of Bitcoin’s hashrate
Another parameter that seems to be heading in the same direction is hashrate.
In fact, on April 16th there were some incidents in China that forced several mining farms to suspend operations, suddenly cutting as much as 35 exahash.
The graph of the Bitcoin hashrate clearly shows that on the following day, April 17th, there was a real collapse, because from 157 Ehash/s two days earlier it had fallen to 105, a drop of 33% in just two days.
Yesterday, this parameter had already risen to 110 Ehash/s, while today it is already back above 130 Ehash/s.
The problem has mainly been reflected in Bitcoin’s block time, which has jumped to 15 minutes from the usual 10 minutes. Yesterday, however, it had already fallen below 12 minutes, though today it seems to be particularly high again.
This data clearly shows that there has been a problem over the last few days, but it seems to be on the way to being solved. However, we will probably have to wait until May before there is a new change in the difficulty that could solve the problem for good. It is possible that this will be one of the largest reductions in difficulty in percentage terms in recent years.
