The Waxing and Waning Moon

Crypto-folk love moon references. Astronomy geeks love lunar phases. The moon waxes and the moon wanes...it grows in visibility up to a full moon (it waxes), then it wanes away. Then it does it again.

I made a little Bitcoin and Ethereum unit-and-price converter website a while back. Then I made it into an app last September and put it in the Google Play store. It grew steadily (it waxed) and then it grew pretty fast along with the Bitcoin price run-up at the end of last year (see graph). Then, with the price decline, my app's usage and device installs have been waning.

That's fine, but I wondered why.

A quick Google Trends search (shows how often people are searching for a term) was made. I checked how often people searched for the term "Bitcoin" during the term of my app's existence, Sept. 1, 2017 to June 17, 2018. The Trends chart is very similar to the "Installs on active devices" graph for the app.

Google Trends is revealing when it comes to price as well. The price of Bitcoin and the quantity of searches seem to have a clear correlation, as below:

At first the answer as to why my app's active installs has been on the decline doesn't seem to be too perplexing...interest has waned. Who knows the reason for less interest/more apathy? Maybe it was the euphoria of the run-up. Maybe it was the fact that many people had still never heard of Bitcoin (let alone another coin), then when the term seemed unavoidable at the end of 2017, the newness and euphoria combined to send the price skyrocketing.

On second thought, though, it might be worthwhile to consider who is included in these statistics. If someone is Googling "Bitcoin", then they must be new to the game. They are likely riding the fad, and learning, but certainly not hard-core cryptoers. And those who use my app are likely either in one of two camps: traders who wish to juggle small units of Bitcoin or Ether and find out various fiat prices accordingly, or newcomers learning what .00045120 satoshis is worth in fiat which they can understand (about a cup of coffee right now).

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it seems clear that interest matters. It affects price (well, duh), but it also draws in greater numbers. A second lesson might be that the wax/wane cycle seems to exist not only in space, but also in the crypto space. Bitcoin has, several times already in its young existence, "died" and then resurfaced again, stronger. My gut is that when things begin to heat up again, many of those who've lost interest will return, my app's install graph will swing upward, and the price will do the same.