Bitcoin is not on the minds of nearly as many people as it was during the holidays last year due to the popping of the bubble that initially brought the price up to $20,000 on some exchanges, but that does not mean everyone has left the party. When comparing the current bear market to the previous one, which started after a similar sharp price decline in late 2013, it’s clear that there has been plenty of growth in the bitcoin ecosystem over the years.

Explaining Bitcoin’s Hype Cycle

One of the most obvious attributes of bitcoin is that the price tends to be rather volatile, and this volatility also exists in terms of interest in the digital asset among the general public. Instead of growing steadily over the past ten years, bitcoin has gone through many boom and bust cycles that have left critics claiming that the “digital gold” is completely dead on countless occasions.

Instead of going away forever, bitcoin tends to be a little bit stronger than it was during the previous bear market after every crash. This growth pattern has been compared to the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Although there have been many bitcoin crashes, the next bubble has always been bigger than the previous one; however, there is certainly no guarantee that this trend will continue.

General Interest

There are many data points that indicate bitcoin is much more popular today than it was during the aftermath of the previous crash in late 2013.

One example can be found with Google Trends, The search term “bitcoin” peaked at a 12 on Google Trends in December 2013, and the search term was down to a 3 by November of the next year. During the current bear market, “Bitcoin” has declined from a 100 to a 7. While this year’s decline has been much steeper, the current score is still more than double than the score from the bear market in the aftermath of the December 2013 crash.

Bitcoin Network and Trading Activity

Obviously, the bitcoin price today is also much higher than it was in November 2014. A move from $325.78 on November 1, 2014 to $6349.22 on November 1, 2018 is a nearly twentyfold increase (data via BitcoinAverage).

According to Blockchain, 24-hour USD trading volume has also grown from roughly $14 million in early November 2014 to over $200 million today.

There has also been growth in terms of activity on the bitcoin network when compared to 2014. While any on-chain data should be taken with a grain of salt due to the pseudonymous nature of the bitcoin network, data from Coin Metrics indicates heavy growth in the areas of active addresses, USD-denominated transaction volume, transaction count, and pretty much every other data point.

Notably, the growth in transaction count is likely quite understated due to the increased use of transaction batching over the past year or so.

While the price of bitcoin and other metrics related to general interest and activity around the bitcoin network could decline further over the next few months, the data so far appears to indicate a continuation of the normal growth curve that has experienced throughout its lifetime.