Bitcoin a safe haven?

Bitcoin Garners New Users as Governments Flood World With Fiat

Reitz said March witnessed a stronger correlation between gold and bitcoin trades in African markets as well. Overall, it appears bitcoin distribution diversified during the coronavirus downturn.

According to the asset manager and research firm Bitwise, nearly all exchanges experienced an increase in volume during March. North American exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini saw the most growth in trading volumes. Kraken’s bitcoin strategist, Pierre Rochard, said the exchange saw a 300 percent increase in new users getting verified in March, compared to the previous month.

“These are new users who didn’t have any crypto beforehand,” Rochard said.

Fiat-denominated prices aren’t the only way to measure bitcoin’s performance. The number of active bitcoin wallet addresses is now comparable to metrics during the sky-high prices of September 2017, according to Coin Metrics, which estimated roughly 770,915 active accounts on March 30, 2020 compared to 718,184 on Sept. 29, 2017.


Although the price of bitcoin briefly dropped 40 percent, down from $9,160 in early March, it recovered to roughly $7,300 as of press time. As such, Luno’s Reitz said bitcoin suffered less of an impact, and recovered faster, than many other asset classes.

I do not put bitcoin and gold in the same class.  Bitcoin is fundamentally an FX tool. However, in times of cental banks distorting prices so badly, the two classes will act the same.  Bitcoin becomes both a safe haven and a place to escape one central bank and adopt another.