On the Complexity and Behaviour of Cryptocurrencies Compared to Other Markets

TL;DR

This paper compares the complexity and behavior of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with traditional markets, revealing similarities and differences through various complexity measures and highlighting the potential of these measures to classify market types.

Contribution

It introduces novel applications of complexity measures to characterize cryptocurrency market behavior and compares these with traditional markets, offering new insights into market classification.

Findings

Bitcoin shares behavioral similarities with stock and precious metal markets.

Litecoin closely follows Bitcoin but lacks some properties.

Different complexity measures can cluster markets by type.

Abstract

We show that the behaviour of Bitcoin has interesting similarities to stock and precious metal markets, such as gold and silver. We report that whilst Litecoin, the second largest cryptocurrency, closely follows Bitcoin's behaviour, it does not show all the reported properties of Bitcoin. Agreements between apparently disparate complexity measures have been found, and it is shown that statistical, information-theoretic, algorithmic and fractal measures have different but interesting capabilities of clustering families of markets by type. The report is particularly interesting because of the range and novel use of some measures of complexity to characterize price behaviour, because of the IRS designation of Bitcoin as an investment property and not a currency, and the announcement of the Canadian government's own electronic currency MintChip.