It’s been an odd couple of weeks for Bitcoin CEO Michael Saylor added $190 million in BTC to the corporate balance sheet.
What I assumed would be a larger driver of price though was the announcement during the 2022 conference that Strike will be integrating with Shopify .
The Strike integration offers an alternative experience to traditional card networks by leveraging the underlying technology of the Bitcoin Lightning Network to allow for instant, global, cash-final payments while also eliminating legacy processing fees like interchange.
From a user interface perspective, the sender uses the Bitcoin network to send dollars with no USD to BTC exchange friction felt by the sender or receiver whatsoever.
For the user, paying for goods through Bitcoin’s Lightning Network might ultimately lead to lower prices for everything since the merchant won’t have to bake the processing fee into the cost of the item.
The exchange flow for Bitcoin is currently at a level that is generally an indicator for positive BTC price moves in the weeks ahead.
You can see in this chart that past instances of the deep red outflows from exchanges have generally led to large moves to the upside in the price of BTC.
To this point, that demand has not been there to a large enough degree despite the efforts of Michael Saylor and Do Kwon.
If bulls aren’t totally out of ammo, the 8-week will cross back over the 20-week for the first time this year.
If the 8-week does manage to cross above the 20-week in a bullish manner, it would be the fourth cross involving the two averages in the last 12 months.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns and the setup isn’t exactly the same as last time, but even when you go further back in Bitcoin’s history four crosses of the 8 and 20 week moving averages in such a short period of time have generally been an indication of consolidation before new highs.
In the daily, we can see immediate resistance potential in the 50-day moving average, $46k, and in the 200-day moving average.
If we look at the year-over-year change in CPI, we see that it was March of 2021 when the year-over-year rate moved up from 1.6% to 2.6%.
The minutes also claimed there were internal Fed voices who opted for 25 bps rather than 50 in March because of Ukraine/Russia war uncertainty.
Of course, what the Fed says it will do and what it actually can do are not exactly synonymous.
Until that changes, I don’t know that bulls are likely to get a strong breakout to the upside from the range that it currently finds itself.
What I will say is I’ve positioned much of my portfolio with the assumption that the Fed is incapable of raising interest rates to a large degree.
If I’m correct, I think Bitcoin will move higher when the market realizes rate hikes that have been priced in aren’t coming.
I’m really excited to share that I’ll be launching a Marketplace service right here on Seeking Alpha called Heretic Speculator PRO in the next few weeks.
Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of BTC-USD either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives.