Fear, Volatility, and Buying More Bitcoin

Over the past 24 hours the CVI (Crypto Volatility Index - here: https://cvi.finance/platform) shot up from under 80 to over 110. That's a 37.5% rise.

At about the same time the Fear and Greed Index (here: https://alternative.me/crypto/fear-and-greed-index/) plunged 28%, from 11 to 8, indicating that the extreme fear crypto investors felt at 11 wasn't near as fearful as they could be.

Of course I bought more bitcoin. I'm not saying that to be cavalier. I routinely add to my positions and lower prices certainly don't deter me. There's nothing new about that, and I'm far from the only bitcoin investor who either dollar-cost-averages or buys when people are panic-selling.

Bitcoin is volatile, subject to wild price swings, and investors need to know that going in. None of this is new and, actually, not the point at all.

But something that is new, is an unexpected correlation I found yesterday while watching the markets. I tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/EricRWade/status/1536388423539232769?s=20&t=M9c9lfHA2Kx7Oo4J1Wrokw

The fourth tweet is what was new to me... and expanded my thoughts about bitcoin. In fact, it's going to take me some time to really process what this says to me. Here's the chart that caught me by surprise:

That's a price chart (thank you @TradingView!) showing a variety of assets and how they fared since the beginning of COVID19's effects on the markets. If you have really good eyes you'll see gold, real estate, the dollar index, China, oil, IXIC, and Pfizer.

And the obvious ones are #bitcoin and @moderna.

The point being... no matter what you thought you knew about either cryptocurrencies, decentralized ledger technology, peer-to-peer cryptographically secured transactions, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, COVID19, mRNA... I bet you didn't know that $BTC (or $XBT) and $MRNA were - for that period of time - more similar than different AS FAR AS PRICE GOES.

I was beyond surprised to see this.

My eyes opened wide... thinking of the possibilities that bitcoin - referred to by many people as a pristine asset (h/t @anthonypompliano @pomp ) - could find itself as a risk-on proxy for other future macro possibilities.

Bitcoin, or at least the price we are willing to pay for it - appears to be quite comfortable tracking as "a cure for what ails us".

Is bitcoin... optimism?

Obviously, bitcoin's price is what we say it is. Bitcoin knows nothing of dollars, yen, euro, rubles... it literally doesn't care. But we do.

And hopefully now you're wondering... "what will we think of next?"

I've said it before and I'll say it again... sometimes the prices of cryptocurrencies are the least interesting aspect of them.