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Welcome to Crypto Long & Short!

This week, Glenn Williams Jr. looks at charts and explains why that’s valuable.

Then, Brett Munster of Onramp Invest argues bitcoin is a deeply ESG asset.

– Nick Baker

I completed the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation in 2018, while still covering traditional equities, no less. I find it useful every day. I don’t subscribe to the “random walk” theory of prices, which states that changes in an asset’s price are completely unpredictable; data, and the charts representing it, can have predictive power.

What is TA? I view it as a graphical representation of investor behavior, with certain patterns and indicators providing a clue about what’s coming next. It has an important place in the three-legged stool of fundamental, technical and quantitative analysis.

While fundamental data is prevalent in TradFi, it doesn’t exist to the same extent in crypto. In fact, the allure of cryptocurrencies to many is the decentralized nature of many of the assets. There is no CEO of bitcoin (BTC), nor is there a balance sheet or statement of cash flows for it. So that’s one leg of the analysis stool that’s missing; it makes sense to pay attention to the other two.

TA encompasses a wide range of topics that goes well beyond looking at lines on a chart and subjective judgments. During my time preparing for the CMT, the emphasis on using hard numbers when making a decision stood out.

For instance, I know very quickly that BTC has breached the upper range of its Bollinger Band three times over the past 25 days. When that happened in January, 30 days later BTC was up 11%. I also know that it’s been 24 days since BTC’s volume was at least twice as high as its 20-day moving average but, despite that, volume on that day doesn’t rank within BTC’s top 50 days since 2015.

From a risk-management perspective. I often use the Average True Range (ATR) metric, to measure an asset’s volatility.

Taking things a step further, I like to look at an asset’s returns, as well as its standard deviation of returns, in comparing one asset to another – essentially distilling what’s seen on a chart into a different format.

Doing so in the following chart shows the risk versus return relationship since January for BTC, ether (ETH), Avalanche’s AVAX, and Binance’s BNB. The S&P 500 (GSPC), Nasdaq (IXIC), Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) were added as well just out of curiosity.

This chart highlights BTC’s outperformance while having a slightly lower standard deviation (risk) than ETH. Also displayed is AVAX’s high level of performance, but with significantly more risk.

This should be kept in mind when looking at other technical indicators, specifically momentum and volume. I would also be inclined to perform the same exercise over different time frames.

All told, TA represents an analysis of data, which starts with what you see specific to price. In many ways, it allows you to ignore the noise or the verbal sales pitch that may come along with an asset. That’s possibly even more important as key crypto figures run into trouble this year.

Whether you believe in technical analysis or not, it’s difficult to ignore price. And it's even more difficult to ignore the market’s overall reaction to it. In crypto markets, that will always be worth looking at.

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If you have any traditional finance (TradFi) background, you know about ESG investing. ESG – which stands for environmental, social and governance – refers to a set of standards used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments. Typically, people who invest in ESGs are as concerned about gains as they are about their investments having a positive impact on the world.

When you consider all these factors it stands to reason that bitcoin (BTC) could be one of the greatest ESG investments of all time. Not only has it generated outsized returns for investors (at the time of writing this, BTC is up 71% in 2023, 342% over the past three years and a whopping 44,404% over the past 10 years), it is having enormous positive impacts globally.

More bitcoin, less fossil fuels

Bitcoin appears to be one of the few sectors, both in the U.S. and globally, that does not have coal as its primary energy source. A recent report found that because much of BTC mining relies so heavily on off-grid power sources, 52.2% of the Bitcoin network is powered by zero-emission energy. There are at least 29 mining companies that use 90%-100% zero-emission energy and another 12 that use emission-negative sources.

Compare that to the main electrical grid in the U.S., in which only 36.7% comes from zero-emission sources. That means that nearly every other major industry within the U.S. relies on a grid that’s nearly two-thirds powered by fossil fuels.

Increased energy efficiency

In addition to relying mostly on clean energy, the Bitcoin network is far more energy efficient than legacy financial systems. Bitcoin mining accounts for less than 0.2% of global energy usage and only 0.09% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Bitcoin, often compared to gold as a store of value, uses less energy than gold to mine and has none of the heavy metal pollutants caused by gold mining. Simply replacing gold or the legacy financial system with a bitcoin standard would be a huge net positive for the environment.

Bitcoin is also good for our energy grid. As a persistent buyer of electricity, bitcoin mining stabilizes the electrical grid by absorbing any excess energy created, thus improving the operational efficiency of power plants and lowering energy prices for consumers.

Incentivizing innovation

Bitcoin’s biggest environmental impact is potentially that it incentivizes innovation and adoption of clean energy sources. Methane gas is about 25 times worse for the environment than carbon dioxide (CO2). Not only that, according to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, “cutting methane is the strongest lever we have to slow climate change over the next 25 years.” It turns out that two of the largest methane producers are oil fields and landfills – which bitcoin mining helps address.

Bitcoin mining company Vespene has developed a method for converting the methane emitted from landfills into electricity to power bitcoin mining rigs in an environmentally friendly way, thus eliminating those methane emissions. Also, bitcoin mining using methane-vented power is far more effective at reducing carbon emissions than any other renewable energy source we have. In fact, mining bitcoin from vented methane removes 13 times more emissions from the environment than coal puts into it.

It’s possible that in a few years, bitcoin mining might prevent more carbon from entering the atmosphere than the carbon emitted from creating the electricity it takes to power the network.

From CoinDesk Deputy Editor-in-Chief Nick Baker, here’s some recent news worth reading:

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