Bitcoin Price Analysis – Interim bottom

Bitcoin continues to make new all-time highs almost every day. The spot price has experienced considerable range expansion with swings between $1997-$2745, according to BLX. The Network Hashrate continues to make all-time highs as well, with successive difficulty adjustments, currently at just over 4 billion GH/s. Difficulty has increased 65.50% year to date.

The block size and scalability debate recently resulted in a meeting organised by Barry Silbert, who produced an agreement among the Bitcoin Unlimited faction to adopt SegWit now, and hard fork in September. Champion of the UASF BIP148, ShaolinFry, said that the agreement was “very ill considered, and clearly lacking peer review from the technical community”.

Block support remains neck and neck with Core and Unlimited blocks approaching parity.

Despite the Silbert agreement, UASF node support has continued to increase, and now has over 12% of Core nodes, which account for 85% of total nodes.

Demand worldwide, which can be measured through daily trading volume, has been unprecedented.

While a high price premium remains on South Korean and Japanese exchanges, USD trading volume has eclipsed most of the rest of the world. CNY has shown surprising gains in trading volume, considering the ongoing fierce regulatory environment to curb capital flight, affecting both exchanges and traders. Some Renminbi cross-border capital controls were lifted in April.

Since the first round of regulatory tightening in China, towards the end of January, CNY volume has been a shadow of it’s former self with USD and JPY volume taking place in it’s stead.

LocalBitcoin CNY volume also suggests exchange controls remain tight, as trading broke new all time highs two weeks ago.

Globally, LocalBitcoin volume also maintains new record highs.

Anti Money Laundering (AML) issues continue to plague USD deposits and withdrawls for Bitfinex, and have done since April. Evidence continues to mount that there is a growing cash shortage on the exchange. Although USD swap rates would likely increase during a strong bull trend, as more users would want to borrow cash for Bitcoin, rates have increased rapidly over the past few weeks.

Immediately following the announcement that USD withdrawals had been halted from Bitfinex on April 13th, bitcoin held a large premium on the exchange compared to Coinbase.

Since around May 19th however, coinbase has held a wide premium over Bitfinex, almost large enough to suggest they were decoupled. However, similar to historic USD swap rates, this may just represent bullish exuberance on Coinbase, a fiat on-ramp.

You can also follow the transactions of the Bitfinex cold exchange wallet here.

Search interest for “blockchain” also continues to strongly trend upward, suggesting, at the very least, curiosity surrounding Bitcoin continues to grow.

Technical Analysis

Price has approached a trajectory where high time frame charts do not yield sufficient, necessary, or even relevant information. While this means price is rising rapidly, forcing analysis of lower and lower timeframes, it also means there is more risk and less reliability, as is generally the case for using signals lower timeframes.

Price also continues to push higher all over the world, with almost a 2x premium in South Korea. Upside targets generally remain the same on higher timeframes, as they have for many months. Using the Pitchfork, which draws trend channels of support and resistance, and Pivots, we can determine how current price fits in the trend as well support and resistance based on prior key levels.

Price broke the longstanding pitchfork, suggesting hastening of trend, as well as tapped the R5 yearly pivot. The only other time Bitcoin has broken the R5 yearly pivot was in early 2013 before the mega bubble so there’s some evidence to suggest this may go much much higher.

However, the median line (red) of the Pitchfork is the return to mean line and remains a high probability support target.

There is a low timeframe shark Harmonic in play, depending on whether or not this local low holds.

Other possibilities include an inverted head and shoulders, yielding a target of $2820, or three drives, yielding a target of $2500, with descending accompanying volume profile.

Bollinger Bands, a measure of volatility channels, is also showing evidence for weakening bearish momentum with a bullish divergence on both Bollinger Band Width and RSI.

A similar Bollinger Band W-bottom was observed on the four hour timeframe in late March.

Conclusion

Demand for Bitcoin continues to swell worldwide, especially in Japanese and South Korean exchanges, pushing price to new all time highs. The Unlimited faction, with the help of Barry Silbert, has publicly supported SegWit. Almost defiantly, UASF node support continues to increase. Bitfinex continues to have trouble with available cash buying BTC, as it now has a negative premium amongst other USD exchanges and an uptrend of USD swap rates. High time frame technicals are weaker in these conditions due to price action. There are several charts to watch for over the course of the next few days, all of which suggest an interim bottom.