  We report on the use of sentiment analysis on news and social media to
analyze and predict the price of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the leading cryptocurrency
and has the highest market capitalization among digital currencies. Predicting
Bitcoin values may help understand and predict potential market movement and
future growth of the technology. Unlike (mostly) repeating phenomena like
weather, cryptocurrency values do not follow a repeating pattern and mere past
value of Bitcoin does not reveal any secret of future Bitcoin value. Humans
follow general sentiments and technical analysis to invest in the market. Hence
considering people's sentiment can give a good degree of prediction. We focus
on using social sentiment as a feature to predict future Bitcoin value, and in
particular, consider Google News and Reddit posts. We find that social
sentiment gives a good estimate of how future Bitcoin values may move. We
achieve the lowest test RMSE of 434.87 using an LSTM that takes as inputs the
historical price of various cryptocurrencies, the sentiment of news articles
and the sentiment of Reddit posts.
