The only time Hacker News is this interested in Bitcoin is when there's a bubble forming
Sun 30 July 2017
You might have got the impression that there are a lot of Bitcoin-related posts on Hacker News lately. With SegWit set to activate in the next few weeks, and Bitcoin Cash likely to fork off on the 1st of August, I took a look at Hacker News' relationship with Bitcoin over the past years.
In this post I'm going to argue, based on historical trends of Bitcoin-related posts on Hacker News, that there is a Bitcoin bubble coming in the next few months.
(Take this with a pinch of salt. Humans are good at seeing patterns where there are none. Don't trade on this information. Don't blame me if you lose money. Don't say I didn't warn you.)
I used Algolia's HN Search API to collect the HN data, and the 99Bitcoins historical price chart to get Bitcoin price data.
How many Bitcoin-related posts are on HN each month?
I used Algolia to find all of the posts matching "bitcoin" going back as far as possible. This turned out to be far too much to look through, so I restricted my search to only those posts that had more than 20 upvotes.
I used URLs like this:
http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=bitcoin&tags=story&numericFilters=points>20
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