Bitcoin Price Prediction: Peer-Reviewed Evidence and Social Media Discourse

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Baquero, Carlos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Baquero, Carlos
author_facet Baquero, Carlos
contents Bitcoin price prediction has attracted hundreds of academic papers and continuous social media debate, yet the field lacks consensus on even basic questions: can any model beat a naive "today's price" baseline at horizons of one to six months? We survey the peer-reviewed landscape, categorize papers by evaluation methodology, and contrast academic findings with informal but substantive discourse on X/Twitter. The picture that emerges is sobering. At short-to-medium horizons, no peer-reviewed study has shown robust superiority over the naive baseline across multiple market regimes. Daily predictability is real but does not extend to hourly or monthly horizons, and may not survive transaction costs. The stock-to-flow model has failed formal out-of-sample testing, and Metcalfe's Law valuations have been challenged as spurious. The Bitcoin price power law, while empirically compelling, has not been subjected to formal distributional tests. Meanwhile, social media practitioners raise valid statistical critiques -- ordinary least squares (OLS) violations, backtest overfitting, spurious regressions -- that the academic literature has not formalized. We identify open research directions and propose concrete methodological standards for future work -- walk-forward evaluation, multi-regime holdout windows, naive baseline comparison, inclusion of zero in hyperparameter grids, and Diebold-Mariano significance testing -- arguing that the field's primary need is not more models but better evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00071
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bitcoin Price Prediction: Peer-Reviewed Evidence and Social Media Discourse
Baquero, Carlos
General Finance
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
General Economics
Economics
62P05, 62M10, 91B8
G.3
Bitcoin price prediction has attracted hundreds of academic papers and continuous social media debate, yet the field lacks consensus on even basic questions: can any model beat a naive "today's price" baseline at horizons of one to six months? We survey the peer-reviewed landscape, categorize papers by evaluation methodology, and contrast academic findings with informal but substantive discourse on X/Twitter. The picture that emerges is sobering. At short-to-medium horizons, no peer-reviewed study has shown robust superiority over the naive baseline across multiple market regimes. Daily predictability is real but does not extend to hourly or monthly horizons, and may not survive transaction costs. The stock-to-flow model has failed formal out-of-sample testing, and Metcalfe's Law valuations have been challenged as spurious. The Bitcoin price power law, while empirically compelling, has not been subjected to formal distributional tests. Meanwhile, social media practitioners raise valid statistical critiques -- ordinary least squares (OLS) violations, backtest overfitting, spurious regressions -- that the academic literature has not formalized. We identify open research directions and propose concrete methodological standards for future work -- walk-forward evaluation, multi-regime holdout windows, naive baseline comparison, inclusion of zero in hyperparameter grids, and Diebold-Mariano significance testing -- arguing that the field's primary need is not more models but better evaluation.
title Bitcoin Price Prediction: Peer-Reviewed Evidence and Social Media Discourse
topic General Finance
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
General Economics
Economics
62P05, 62M10, 91B8
G.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00071