Anlisi delle componenti che influenzano il prezzo del Bitcoin e i suoi collegamenti con l'oro ​

In the last decade, a new asset made his appearance in the economic world, assuming more and more importance as time goes by. Its name is Bitcoin, it belongs to the family of cryptocurrencies , and at the present time it is the most popular one. Starting from 2015, this digital currency started to attract more and more investors, but also many economists, given its highly volatile trend. In this sense, many scholars tried to explain the constant evolution in Bitcoin's price, without being able to obtain a uniform answer to this question. In particular, Bitcoin was supposed to have many different origins: from a purely speculative investment to a pure diversifier, passing through an hybrid of the two. Following the second and third hypothesis, many authors(and backers of Bitcoin) started to look at the cryptocurrency as a safe haven investment, able to hedge the investors against bear markets situations. This affirmation created a big discussion among economists, in particular in the last year, where the digital currency was mainly associated to gold. In this sense, many studies tried to make clarifications on this question, but once again the answer to it was not unique. The main purpose of this thesis is to create two independent econometric models for the price of Bitcoin and for the price of gold by using some new economic variables that have not been considered in the previous studies (such as an economic surprise index the FED rates, and the FED's monetary base) that, associated with some specific variables of the two , could explain which are the main drivers of the two assets. In this sense, a very interesting result for the Bitcoin model is obtained, with a very high fit for the variables taken in consideration. In general, the estimation results highlight the fact that the Bitcoin and the precious metal are still very different, given the strong speculative component of the cryptocurrency, but at the same time leaves some possibilities for an increasing correlation in the future among the two.