Bitcoin’s seasonal affective disorder
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Bitcoin’s seasonal affective disorder
By Mike Hearn
Posted March 23, 2015
In the past couple of years Bitcoin has been settling into a regular seasonal growth pattern, in which growth stops during the summer and we add users during the autumn/winter months (in the northern hemisphere).
It’s a little hard to see on this 2-year graph because Bitcoin traffic is easily affected by press cycles and the accompanying bubbles. When the price is skyrocketing a lot of coins move in/out of exchanges and this results in a volume spike.
However the pattern has been getting clearer with time. After the late 2013 bubble traffic grew steadily from January 2014 to around March, then fell a bit and then didn’t do very much over the summer. Starting around August 2014 traffic started to grow steadily again throughout the autumn and winter months with a sharp and obvious drop for Christmas, before steadying out again around March at around 100,000 transactions per day (1.15 txns/sec average)
Assuming a quiet summer I suspect we’ll see a slight fall as we head into April/May and organic growth will resume around August.