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Comment by lz400 | Hacker News Reader

If you see the bitcoin charts, price has gone up a lot in the last few years but volume has tanked. Do I read this right that now crypto is basically a smaller market where a bunch of whales scam a ever dwindling but never completely disappearing flow of fools and marks?

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I think a lot of the volume on spot BTC has gone to ETFs, DATs, perps, WBTC, and other derivatives, when a few years ago spot was really the only option. Hard to track total volumes now.

I suspect that most of the trades are off-chain now, due to blockchain being being complete and utter crap for fast transactions by design. So people are entrusting their tokens to the centralized entity and receive some IOUs from it, with which they trade and that centralized platform. Basically unlicensed banks recreated with all negatives of the bank and no benefits.

Volume appears pretty normal to me. Where do you get the idea that it’s tanked?

Volume has been on a steady downward trend since 2018. https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&r=week&t=b

In BTC. In USD it is +-same.

Volume != value. Less trading can be a sign of more holding

But people are “holding” nothing more than a line on a spreadsheet. The only true value a cryptocurrency has is in enabling transactions.

If that’s not what it’s doing, then it will eventually have no value.

Less trading is the sign of an illiquid market, which can mean pricing becomes volatile and eventually meaningless.

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