Mark Helfman

When Bitcoin made its most recent run, you might've felt bad about your altcoins. Who could blame you? Many were down 90% since the beginning of the year. Now, we’re getting the altcoin pump you’ve wanted. If your portfolio tracker isn’t clear enough, you can see this pump on my chart of altcoin dominance, which strips out BTC, ETH, and the big stablecoins to see how much money’s going into the millions of smaller tokens rather than the big ones. The pump is clear. This is also no surprise.

Recently, we saw Bitcoin’s hash ribbon trigger. This signals some sort of distress among miners. The cost of mining went too high. Some miners shut down. Short- and long-term measures of hashrate inverted, causing the ribbons to flash. For a long time, this was a bullish signal. When miners went through periods of distress, they sold, tamping down on Bitcoin’s price. Once they finish selling, the market would rise again. Hash ribbons gave us a quick way to tell when the winds shifted.

Are you one of the people talking about a bull flag on the daily chart? Me too. I shared this in a recent post for my newsletter, Crypto is Easy. After a powerful uptrend, Bitcoin’s price went sideways and down in a roughly symmetrical way, then broke above the top “resistance” trendline. A bull flag, as the traders say. Like so: A textbook bull flag will not have consolidation circled above, and the trendlines would be parallel. Let’s not be sticklers for lines on a chart. Close enough is good enough.