A few years ago, I put up some startup money for a few fellas who wanted to open a high-end, drive-through car wash. Some of their sales come from passes (where you pay a monthly fee and can use the car wash as often as you like). But most of the sales come from single car wash sales. This is clearly discretionary spending. You don’t need to wash your car to drive it. Hold that thought.
For about a decade, I’ve suffered from severe Meniere’s disease which has left mostly deaf. If you’ve ever called my cell phone, I explain in my outgoing message that “I don’t do phones” and that you have to text or email me. This is, in part, due to my Meniere’s disease. I’ve also been diagnosed with a mild case of Aspergers. Only recently have scientists begun to believe that the two diseases are somehow connected. Anyway, the diseases are the reason I have a useless ability to remember large amounts of worthless data and visualize it in my head.
Here comes the Bitcoin part. I get a sales report from our car wash every month and after a couple of years, I realized that the price of Bitcoin follows the sales of car washes with an almost perfect correlation. I originally thought it was one of those funny, nonsensical correlations that you see on social media, and so I didn’t take it seriously.
Here are some of the weirdest ones: Spurious Correlations
But because it’s been such a strong correlation over time, I’m starting to think there is something to it. Although many of the Bitcoins that exist are owned by a few people, those big holders of Bitcoin don’t seem to trade much. The price of Bitcoin is swayed by many fickle small investors who only own a few coins on average. I’m thinking that they are simply parking extra money in Bitcoin, during times when they have extra money, just in case Bitcoin pops. And when someone has extra money, they run their car through the car wash. Both are discretionary expenditures.
Bitcoin isn’t a real investment. It has no intrinsic value. It isn’t a share of a productive business. It’s merely legalized gambling and no one MUST gamble. Could the price of Bitcoin be mostly swayed by how much discretionary money small crypto investors have to buy Bitcoin… and to wash their cars with?
