For what it’s worth, somebody has created an algorithm that (supposedly) measures sentiment in the crypto markets. Values computed by this algorithm range from Extreme Fear to Extreme Greed.
They say that sentiment is in the Extreme Fear range right now (22 Aug, 1930 GMT).
Here’s their graphic –
And here’s their website – Crypto Fear & Greed Index - Bitcoin Sentiment - Alternative.me
That’s very interesting do you know the author and have they labelled some inputs it uses?
Thanks for sharing… Do you program?
BTC is the closest thing to gold in the crypto market.
Considering 1 and 2, you have a lot of trading possibilities.
This index actually looks fairly credible to me. If you check Bitcoin dominance, it is extremely high right now, at 68.5%, displaying good convergence with the results of the fear index.
I wouldn’t base my trading decisions solely on this index though. the fear index certainly provides good confirmation/disproof for a solid tech analysis though.
Always useful to keep an eye on it, I guess 
Just saw this one recently:
The commentary was that if sentiment for BTC improves (this fear and greed index), we’ll probably see further gains for BTC.
Absolutely, if there is fear in the crypto market, everybody jumps to BTC, the sentiment for BTC improves and its price increases as everybody is buying it.
I guess in this index, extreme fear is 0, and total confidence is 100. So I would expect BTC price to increase every time we reach lower values (closer to 0) on the Fear index. That correlation doesn’t seem to work at all between Feb 18 and Aug 18 though. Weird. Probably due to the 2018 crash? Or maybe when the confidence is high (Fear is low), every crypto is bought, including BTC, boosting its price as well…
I certainly would like to see a more detailed explanation of this chart and the correlation between the Fear Index and Bitcoin Price.
Thanks for adding this chart @ponponwei , very interesting.
Yup! So I know when to stock up 
But I don’t know, being that the Fear Index doesn’t seem to correlate with BTC price clearly, is it even reliable for seeing future patterns? You’re right though, maybe we just don’t have enough info on the analysis.
I stil think it’s all made up for everything there for whatever reason you may have with such. Nobody never invented such graphs with whatever reason it may really have for everything. Who could work with such ? I am not that sure.
It’s definitly up to you whether you should believe the people and the data. But at minimum, the index is something. Here’s how they ultimately calculate the index:
We are gathering data from the five following sources. Each data point is valued the same as the day before in order to visualize a meaningful progress in sentiment change of the crypto market.
First of all, the current index is for bitcoin only (we offer separate indices for large alt coins soon), because a big part of it is the volatility of the coin price.
Volatility (25 %) We’re measuring the current volatility and max. drawdowns of bitcoin and compare it with the corresponding average values of the last 30 days and 90 days. We argue that an unusual rise in volatility is a sign of a fearful market.
Market Momentum/Volume (25%) Also, we’re measuring the current volume and market momentum (again in comparison with the last 30/90 day average values) and put those two values together. Generally, when we see high buying volumes in a positive market on a daily basis, we conclude that the market acts overly greedy / too bullish.
Social Media (15%) While our reddit sentiment analysis is still not in the live index (we’re still experimenting some market-related key words in the text processing algorithm), our twitter analysis is running. There, we gather and count posts on various hashtags for each coin (publicly, we show only those for Bitcoin) and check how fast and how many interactions they receive in certain time frames). A unusual high interaction rate results in a grown public interest in the coin and in our eyes, corresponds to a greedy market behaviour.
Surveys (15%) Together with strawpoll.com (disclaimer: we own this site, too), quite a large public polling platform, we’re conducting weekly crypto polls and ask people how they see the market. Usually, we’re seeing 2,000 - 3,000 votes on each poll, so we do get a picture of the sentiment of a group of crypto investors. We don’t give those results too much attention, but it was quite useful in the beginning of our studies. You can see some recent results here.
Dominance (10%) The dominance of a coin resembles the market cap share of the whole crypto market. Especially for Bitcoin, we think that a rise in Bitcoin dominance is caused by a fear of (and thus a reduction of) too speculative alt-coin investments, since Bitcoin is becoming more and more the safe haven of crypto. On the other side, when Bitcoin dominance shrinks, people are getting more greedy by investing in more risky alt-coins, dreaming of their chance in next big bull run. Anyhow, analyzing the dominance for a coin other than Bitcoin, you could argue the other way round, since more interest in an alt-coin may conclude a bullish/greedy behaviour for that specific coin.
Trends (10%) We pull Google Trends data for various Bitcoin related search queries and crunch those numbers, especially the change of search volumes as well as recommended other currently popular searches. For example, if you check Google Trends for “Bitcoin”, you can’t get much information from the search volume. But currently, you can see that there is currently a +1,550% rise of the query „bitcoin price manipulation“ in the box of related search queries (as of 05/29/2018). This is clearly a sign of fear in the market, and we use that for our index.
Sourced from Crypto Fear & Greed Index - Bitcoin Sentiment - Alternative
i will say the surveys are a bit disappointing, numbers wise. 2k-3k respondents is nowhere near a definitive answer on anything that has a global audience and user base. And while social media mentions are becoming more integrated into other asset indicators and metrics, Reddit alone is only a tiny fraction of all social media activity worldwide.
But it is something you can keep an eye on, and go back to historically, to see if any correlations can be made.
