Bitcoin vs. Altcoins: A Story of Six Coins and Two Outliers

vs. Altcoins is a hot topic, and there are several large groups that share a school of thought and millions of people with their own views. This may or may not change your mind.

However, if you are a bitcoin maximalist, some other type of maximalist, a swing trader, or an investor exploring cryptocurrencies, I wrote this with the goal of giving you valuable insight into it. These data points and conclusions are provided for your use.

At the time of writing, there are now over 20,450 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap. Virtually all schools of thought agree that this is too much and that over 90% of these projects are failures at best.

Let’s explore some charts courtesy of TradingView. Typically, you view the charts as a cryptocurrency versus . All charts below compare the cryptocurrency to bitcoin.

Ether

First of all, . Ether, the network’s native token, is the largest altcoin, and has many proponents who insist that one day, even soon, it will “change” or overtake Bitcoin in market cap.

It has the following in its favor:

• #2 market capitalization
• The “merge” from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake is currently scheduled for late September.
• More money is traded on the Ethereum network than bitcoin on a daily basis.

Here’s what it doesn’t have going for it:

ETH/BTC

ETH/BTC weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

ETH/BTC barely reached half of its ATH in the 2021 bull run vs. the 2017 bull run.

To be clear, this is the price per coin, not the market cap. That said, at one point ETH had no limit on the number of coins that could be mined again. In 2021, Ethereum went through a network upgrade to become anti-inflationary, and a portion of its supply was regularly burned.

This should help its total token price in the long run, but it will also mean that it won’t outperform bitcoin simply by mining more coins.

Bitcoin was split or “forked” on August 1, 2017, due to a disagreement over changing its code and working structure. As a result, two blockchains were created from the original chain. The “core” of Bitcoin, as it was called, resulted in “Bitcoin Cash”. Roger Ver, Craig Wright, and Jihan Wu were some of the leaders in the Bitcoin Cash community at the time.

Bitcoin Cash originally had a lot of support and was a top 5 cryptocurrency for quite some time. It eventually had its own controversial hard fork in 2018, resulting in Bitcoin SV, led by Craig Wright.

BCH/BTC

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

Now back to looking at the numbers, which are actually very hard to see, as at its 2021 bull run peak, BCH/BTC barely reached 1/10th of its 2017 bull run peak.

Litecoin is another proof-of-work cryptocurrency that has been around since 2014, so we can actually see three bull runs. There are no major controversies to explain any collapse of Litecoin.

USD/BTC

monthly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

Now let’s explore an even more extreme case, EOS. The token was issued by a Hong Kong-based company called Block.one. It was once a top 10 cryptocurrency and one of the largest ICOs of 2017.

His biggest achievement appears to have been using his token sale to buy 140,000 bitcoins, currently valued at around $3.2 billion.

EOS/BTC

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

It’s actually very hard to get to this chart as EOS/BTC is down over 90% since the token’s launch, but you may see a little flicker in late May 2021 compared to its initial peak in May 2021. 2018.

Monero and ZCash

Here is the chart for the long-term privacy coin, Monero:

6_XMRBTC_2022-08-04_12-05-32

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

His 2021 bull market peak is about 1/3 of his 2018 bull market peak.

Now let’s take a look at another privacy coin, ZCash, which I believe is the only privacy coin available on a US regulated crypto exchange (Gemini):

7_ZECBTC_2022-08-04_12-14-59

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

XRP

And just for some variety, let’s take a look at XRP, which is currently a top 10 cryptocurrency.

8_XRPBTC_2022-08-04_12-54-07

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

It could be argued that the ongoing lawsuit against the SEC has affected the price of the token, as XRP was delisted from US exchanges after the start of the lawsuit. That said, the 2021 bull market peak is about 1/4 of the early 2018 bull market peak.

I don’t need to show you 1,000 charts.

Atypical values

I noticed two outliers.

One is . The long-term altcoin was originally a fork (copy) of Litecoin that Jackson Palmer and Billy and was itself a joke, intended to make fun of cryptocurrencies.

It has always been popular with traders due to its volatile nature even before the 100x bomb of 2021.

DOGO/BTC

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

This was part of the meme coin craze of early 2021, following GameStop (NYSE:) and AMC bombs, and was fueled by celebrity endorsements from Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and others. Therefore, I do not consider this to be a sustainable or predictable trend.

Jokes aside, here’s the other outlier I see here.

, BNB, which is linked to one of the two largest and most profitable crypto exchanges in the world, Binance. Binance has built a massive crypto community and empire. Its exchange token is possibly the most successful ICO in history.

BNB actually outperformed BTC in the last bear and bull market.

BNB/BTC

weekly candles. Courtesy of TradingView.

Feel free to leave any real outliers you find in the comments. Please don’t flirt or I’ll block you immediately.

Conclusions

From this one might assume that these are the rule, with few exceptions:

1. Bitcoin outperforms altcoins in bear markets.
2. Altcoins outperform bitcoin in bull markets.
3. During bull markets, swing traders tend to buy altcoins.
4. During the middle and end of bull markets, swing traders tend to make a profit, selling altcoins into bitcoin, stablecoins, and fiat.
5. Surviving altcoins get progressively worse in the next bull market against BTC.

This article was originally published on The Latest Block.