Macrotrends.net

Many would suggest cryptocurrencies, especially altcoins, tend to bubble and bust. With this in mind, Macrotrends.net offers a way to see the entire price chart of most assets (which shows how bubbles and busts are hardly unique to cryptocurrency).

Really, the only thing unique about cryptocurrencies in terms of price action is how quickly they bubble and bust. Even the monthly chart of Bitcoin from 2011 to today doesn’t look all that abnormal if compared to say Amazon since its inception. With Bitcoin, 2014 looks like a blip, with Amazon 2000 looks like a blip; the only real difference from a technical standpoint, in many ways, is the timeframe and the reality that Bitcoin’s bubble popped in 2018 and Amazon’s didn’t).

The patterns that are formed, in other words, aren’t even remotely unique to cryptocurrency. Instead, they can be found across many different assets if one looks at things from a zoomed out perspective.

Consider the DOW over the past 100 years, Gold prices over 100 years, Gold against the DOW, the US dollar against the Aussie Dollar since 1995, all major tech companies currently (maybe by looking at the DOW vs. the NASDAQ), US Bonds since the 1940s, etc.

Wherever you look, from equities, to bonds, to currencies, to metals, from companies, to indexes, you’ll find the same basic chart patterns playing out.

I’d argue that this is essentially due to the speculative nature of capital markets paired with human behavior (which creates market cycles).

Technical analysis is based on the above truisms, and when you look at enough charts on enough time scales, you can see the wisdom of analyzing such things and expecting patterns to repeat.

The point of this page is simple, it is only to suggest you check out the overarching price chart of your favorite assets and compare them to your favorite cryptos.

Ignore the time scale for a second, and nothing about crypto should seem as intense or absurd than it might otherwise seem.

That, or your takeaway will be that the entire global market since its inception has a degree of absurdity to it.

I’d suggest that both those answers have elements of truth to them.

With that said, analyzing such things can also help you to understand why cryptocurrency is so attractive. That is, despite the low volume market, you can end up seeing price action in a month that it would take decades to see in other assets. If you can play your hand right, fortunes can be made rather quickly (of course, a few missteps, and it is fortunes lost rather quickly). Crypto is a high stakes game, however, if you mess up you can HODL and hope to catch the next run a lot easier with a major crypto than you can with a more traditional slower moving asset. So that is also a plus.