The ECB is hiding on Reddit. “Crowds only know simple and extreme feelings,” wrote Gustave Le Bon in Psychology of Crowds in 1895. Two economists from Frankfurt wanted to verify this on more than 8 million Reddit messages passed through an AI mill.
Their barometer of morale among small holders is called R-RISI and it exists in a bitcoin version. The ECB note falls a few days after bitcoin fell towards $70,000 when more than a billion dollars in positions were jumped in 24 hours.
Key Points
A GPT-5.1 model sorted millions of posts from 14 Reddit forums, including crypto.
Morale measured on r/Bitcoin plunged during the crashes of 2017-2018 and 2022-2023.
Its predictive power on BTC does not exceed one session.
Frankfurt, long hostile to bitcoin, has made it an object of study.
The authors are Fabian Wagner and Julian Metzler. Their method is detailed in ECB working paper No. 3276, published in August 2026, then popularized on November 12 on the institution's blog.
The corpus is copious. 8.49 million messages published between January 2015 and April 2026 on 14 subreddits, from r/wallstreetbets to r/Bitcoin via r/CryptoCurrency, r/ethereum, r/Economics or r/Gold. Subreddits are Reddit's thematic forums, recognizable by the "r/" which precedes their name.
Each message passes through the hands of GPT-5.1, queried via the ECB's internal API. The model assigns it a positive, negative or neutral tone, then a theme and, if applicable, a ticker. A highly commented and well-rated post is heavier than a cry in the desert. There are just over 4.1 million left after filtering.
And does AI hold up? The researchers had 73,669 messages relabeled ten times in a row. The feeling falls on the same label in 88.9% of cases and the frank contradictions between positive and negative peak at 0.5%. Small downside, no human labeling test has been published.
Bitcoin sentiment changes mood faster than price
The bitcoin indicator is based on r/Bitcoin, the social network forum entirely dedicated to the first cryptocurrency. Opened in 2010, it now has nearly 8 million members who post news, analyzes and rants. Community votes show the most followed messages. It turned frankly red during the two major bear markets of the period, in 2017-2018 then in 2022-2023.
However, the curve often detaches itself from the price of BTC. Much more often than the sister indicator devoted to the Magnificent Seven, the seven American tech and AI giants. Wagner and Metzler see faster reversals of conviction among bitcoiners.
Those who dreamed of a trading signal will be disappointed. The morale of r/Bitcoin on a given day is linked to the next day's prices at a threshold of 5%. Beyond that, the effect evaporates.
The link is clearer on the S&P 500 and it strengthens in pain. In the decline phase, the next day's coefficient is 3.4 times higher. The R-RISI also leads by about a week the weekly survey of the AAII, the American association of individual investors whose strategists monitor each publication.
Anti-bitcoin ECB now reads bitcoiners
The counter has salt. In May 2022, Christine Lagarde said on Dutch television that cryptocurrencies “are worthless”. In November of the same year, two ECB executives, Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf, signed a post on the house blog entitled “Bitcoin’s last stand”. BTC had just hit its lowest of the cycle, around $16,000.
Four years later, Frankfurt sifts through the forum of its supporters. The ECB's X account assumed this on November 12, writing that individuals “become speculative traders”.
The interest in a central bank is very concrete. A classic opinion survey arrives weeks late while a forum reacts within the hour to a customs tariff or a crash. The authors cite the example of April 2025, when messages on American customs duties caused the indicator to plunge in the middle of a stock market storm.
