Group Members:
- Mohamed Zeina (23441)
Introduction
Cryptocurrency is a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank which means that its price does not depend on the local market or the local economy.
The number of cryptocurrencies available over the internet as of 7 January 2018 is over 1384 and growing.
Here are some of the most viral ones:
- Bitcoin
- Litecoin
- Ethereum
- Zcash
- Ripple
Motivation
Cryptocurrency is a hot topic these days and lots of people have been wondering about the path of price fluctuations that these currencies are going through. In this project, I will be focusing on Bitcoin because it is the one that went viral the most, and it also had an impact on the prices of other cryptocurrencies. It’s interesting to find a correlation with the price of Bitcoin in order to predict its price in the future for trading purposes.
The two free data sets that have been obtained are as follow:
- The first dataset contains the price of Bitcoin (lows and highs) from March 2013 until February 2018
- The second dataset contains the number of searches for the word “Bitcoin” on google search engines.
I think and have actually observed that there is a high correlation between these two data sets. To have a clearer view of how there might be a correlation between both sets, here’s a graph showing the search count for the word “Bitcoin” in millions:
With the data from the first dataset, it confirms that at those high spikes in 2017, this is when Bitcoin’s price Skyrocketed.
Links to obtained datasets:
- https://www.kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/cryptocurrencypricehistory
- https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-07-14%202018-02-20&q=bitcoin
Cryptocurrency 