How HODLing and Bitcoin Price Correlate

Just when you may think that Reddit, a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, cannot possibly have a subreddit dedicated to anything in the world, they prove you wrong. Over at the immensely popular DataIsBeautiful subreddit, its user Anthony Xie measured how often the term “HODL” (hold the funds) appeared in comments on Reddit over the past year, and found how it correlates to price fluctuations.

As Xie states in a post on Hackernoon, “Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a flood of HODL mentions in the past year. So I decided to analyze every Reddit comment mentioning “HODL” to examine the relationship of HODL vs. the total value of the cryptocurrency market over time (market capitalization).”

“Originally I thought that if I overlaid the price movement of BTC, a negative price movement would match up perfectly with an increased [number] of HODL mentions,” Xie says, “I was wrong. It wasn’t just market losses that increased #HODL mentions. Market volatility increases the [number] of HODL comments.”

In the original Reddit post comments, another user proposes, “How about percentage of HODL comments as a percentage of total crypto comments?” and the original poster promises a “HODL density” chart as his part 2.

Interestingly, at the time HODL comments peaked and prices plummeted, searches for the terms “cryptocurrency” and “Bitcoin” for the same period have similarly dipped significantly.