Seasonality and Interconnectivity within Cryptocurrencies - An Analysis on the Basis of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Namecoin

Abstract

The market development of cryptocurrencies illustrates an institutional change how payments can be released and received without the need of any intermediary or trusted central party to clear virtual transactions. As academia focuses mostly on Bitcoin, the increased money demand within cryptocurrencies, its linkages, the wide range of possible channels to release and receive executed payments (payment patterns) and the wide range of different underlying motivations why cryptocurrencies are demanded to release payments (payment behavior) is still uncovered. One might assume that payment patterns and payment behavior converges in the future as soon as the experimenting phase would have cooled down. However we observe that Bitcoin shows a strong, Litecoin a weak and Namecoin no weekday seasonality. By analyzing observed number of payments directly (between these cryptocurrencies) and indirectly (via the Bitcoin exchange-rate) we find no relationship. We conclude on these findings that payment patterns and payment behaviors on the basis of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Litecoin and Namecoin continue to diverge.

Keywords: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Decentralized Transactions, Digital Currency, Litecoin, Namecoin, Payment Behavior, Virtual Money