Despite the 14-month long bear market, BTC transaction rate reaching 2017 all-time high.
Transaction fees also have remained relatively stable.
I really can't understand what is causing that much tx's. I mean, the peak of 2017 was probably because of people claiming forks and the FOMO (buying/selling) during the last months. What is happening now? Is it increasing adoption in the middle of a bear market?
On second thought... fees were as much expensive during the 2017 peak that many people (including me) were very shy about sending any tx unless strictly needed. Now you can do it without a second thought.
I'm not sure if normal users have any significant impact on BTC prices. So an increase in use doesn't necessarily imply an increase in price.
The average person has an annual post-tax income of around 1-2k USD. Take 2/3 away for rent, food and other expenses and you're left with some 300-600 USD. It would then take 10m users chipping away their entire disposable monthly income on Bitcoin.
And even then it would only account for the 24h volume or 10% of the market cap.
In reality the average person probably has less money left over and wouldn't think about putting it all in, much less regularly.
The bottom line is that unless hundreds of millions jump on simultaneously there won't be much movement in the price (based on increased use).
I'm almost fully convinced that the big players are (basically) just waiting for golden and death crosses on long-term charts and thus reinforcing the self-fulfilling prophecy of technical trading with everything else just being short-term noise until a truly big change in the landscape, such as institutional money actually flooding onto the blockchain instead of non-physically settled instruments, occurs.
