The only time HN is this interested in Bitcoin is when there's a bubble (2017)

Summary

The only time Hacker News is this interested in Bitcoin is when there's a bubble forming Sun 30 July 2017 Tagged: bitcoin You might have got the impression that there are a lot of Bitcoin-related posts on Hacker News lately. With SegWit set to activate in the next few weeks, and Bitcoin Cash likely to fork off on the 1st of August, I took a look at Hacker News' relationship with Bitcoin over the past years. In this post I'm going to argue, based on historical trends of Bitcoin-related posts on Hacker News, that there is a Bitcoin bubble coming in the next few months. (Take this with a pinch of salt. Humans are good at seeing patterns where there are none. Don't trade on this information. Don't blame me if you lose money. Don't say I didn't warn you.) I used Algolia's HN Search API to collect the HN data, and the 99Bitcoins historical price chart to get Bitcoin price data. How many Bitcoin-related posts are on HN each month? I used Algolia to find all of the posts matching "bitcoin" going back as far as possible. This turned out to be far too much to look through, so I restricted my search to only those posts that had more than 20 upvotes. I used URLs like this: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=bitcoin&tags=story&numericFilters=points>20 And here's a chart showing the results: The x axis is time, grouped by month. The y axis is number of posts on Hacker News that match the search term "bitcoin" and have more than 20 votes. (2010 has a few months missing, so the x axis is not quite linear in time. This is because some months had 0 results and my spreadsheet-fu is weak. I'm sorry.) Notice the big uptick in Bitcoin interest on Hacker News this month, and compare to historical events. What were the peaks, and what happened next? As you might expect, the peaks in Bitcoin-related posts on HN correspond roughly to peaks in the Bitcoin price. What's interesting is that the number of Bitcoin-related posts for this July (the current month) looks very similar t...