Bitcoin tripped and fell. Is it hurt?
Bitcoin tripped. Now the markets are waiting to see if it's actually hurt or whether they can laugh at it.
Right now the Bitcoin markets are caught in a brief, but timeless, moment.
It's that split second right after you watch a friend trip and fall down the bottom half of a medium-sized staircase, and you're waiting to find out whether you can laugh at them or whether they're actually hurt.
That's where Bitcoin is.
It eagerly pounded its way up the hill to $9,000 then slipped, uttered a profanity and hit the ground. It was pretty funny to watch, but you can't laugh until you're sure Bitcoin's not hurt.
According to the above chart, Bitcoin prices are usually going down when the 30-day moving average (red line) is above the Bitcoin prices (spiky blue line).
Right now the red line is above the blue line, so that's no good. They should be the other way around.
Bitcoin might have actually hurt itself. Walk it off, buddy, walk it off.
What's Tether doing these days?
Tether has also been shaking in interesting ways over the last 48+ hours.
As you can see, market forces have seen it bounce around its $1 peg over the last couple of days, and it's spent a lot of the time chilling below the $1 mark.
As a general rule of thumb, when USDT is above $1, it means people are converting Bitcoin to USDT on account of the markets looking glum. When it's riding below $1 that typically means people are going the other way and selling USDT in exchange for Bitcoin.
If you take that as a general sign of sentiment, we can see that yesterday Tether mostly hung around sub-dollar, while today it's been spending extended times at or above its peg. That would also suggest bad times for Bitcoin prices.
Some of the big USDT movements of the last couple of days appear to be people buying back into Bitcoin following the dips, but according to the informal Tether indicator, they're just feeling kind of over it by now.
According to several experts, Bitcoin might have fractured a bone, and it's still too soon to laugh at it.
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Disclosure: The author holds BTC, BNB, ATOM and IOTA at the time of writing.
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