Bitcoin Markets Comprise Imminent Alternative to Foreign Exchange

A report authored by researchers from the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics has found that Bitcoin is maturing. The report, courtesy of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, concludes that Bitcoin carries “concrete potential of imminently becoming a regular market” and “an alternative to the foreign exchange.”

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Polish Researchers Seek to Assess Maturity of Bitcoin Markets

The study, which is “Based on 1-min price changes recorded since year 2012,” assesses “the fluctuation properties of the rapidly emerging Bitcoin market … over chosen sub-periods, in terms of return distributions, volatility autocorrelation, Hurst exponents, and multiscaling effects.”

“Since high-frequency price data are available since the beginning of trading,” the researchers argue that “Bitcoin offers a unique window into the statistical characteristics of a market maturation trajectory.”

“Statistical Irregularities” Only Identified During Bitcoin Markets’ Infancy

Published in the scientific journal, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, the report states that “While early trading was affected by system-specific irregularities, it is found that over the months preceding April 2018 all these statistical indicators approach the features hallmarking maturity. This can be taken as an indication that the Bitcoin market, and possibly other cryptocurrencies, carry concrete potential of imminently becoming a regular market alternative to the foreign exchange.”

Professor Stanisław Drożdż, one of the researchers who worked on the study, stated: “Initially, the graphs we got were a bit crooked, which did not augur anything promising. But when we took a closer look at the data, suddenly it turned out that this crookedness originated from the first two years of the analyzed period, that is, from the time when the market was just starting to shape itself. Later on, the rates of return fluctuated according to the inverse cubic law.”

Cryptocurrency Markets Will Pose “Very Real Competition” to Forex Markets

Professor Drożdż asserts that “One of the more sophisticated features signaling the maturity of a market is the multifractal nature of its characteristics. Multifractals are fractals of fractals, i.e. structures in which, in order to see self-similarity, various fractal fragments have to be magnified at different speeds. Multifractal analyses reveal dependencies existing in many scales. In the case of Bitcoin, we detected multifractality in the functions of fluctuations in rates of return, particularly evident in the last six months of the examined period. This was of the same type as for regular, mature markets, such as the stock, dollar, oil or bond markets.”

“The most important statistical parameters of the Bitcoin market indicate very clearly that for many months now it has met all the important criteria of financial maturity. It seems that in the case of other cryptocurrencies it will be possible to expect a similar transformation. If this happens, the world’s largest market, the Forex market, can look forward to very real competition,” professor Drożdż concluded.

Do you agree with the researchers’ assertions that the bitcoin markets will soon be seen as a mainstream alternative to foreign exchange? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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