Is Bitcoin a Commodity? On price jumps, demand shocks, and certainty of supply

By M. Gronwald. Journal of International Money and Finance, 2019

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper discusses how similar Bitcoin is to a commodity. The application of a number of both linear and non-linear GARCH models indicates that the role of extreme price movements is particularly pronounced. GARCH models with student- t innovations as well as combined jump-GARCH models are among the models with the best fit. The role of large movements is found to be stronger in the Bitcoin market than in the markets for crude oil and gold. As Bitcoin shares with these exhaustible resource commodities characteristics such as the fixed supply, the analysis of Bitcoin prices can generally learn from the analysis of exhaustible resource commodities. However, whereas the short-run supply of gold and oil are uncertain, there are no uncertainties on the Bitcoin supply-side. Thus, the observed movements of Bitcoin prices can be interpreted as results of Bitcoin demand shocks.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c74cc88d636ee035bd46579c838598005bb725e

Citations in the corpus

• Forecasting the volatility of Bitcoin: The importance of jumps and structural breaks (2020, unknown): “Gronwald (2019) shows that Bitcoin price dynamics are particularly influenced by extreme price movements, more than in the markets for crude oil or gold which is possibly a result of the immaturity of the market.”