Why am I Not Surprised?

[ffutures]

According to tonight's Evening Standard the value of BitCoin has plummeted 80% in the last year. Cue cries of "Told you so!" from all and sundry, and huge relief from me that I stayed well out of it...

Comments

[kedamono]

The same here. I've always called it Pokémon and tulip bulbs. Worth nothing but what folks are willing to pay real money for it.

[ffutures]

Exactly. Anything which relies on pure number crunching as a source of money in itself has to be deeply deranged. I suspect that other crypto-currencies will follow.

[lilfluff]

When gold, land, and nearly and other actual durable physical good that's been considered valuable over time has in reality held at a pretty steady value once you adjust for inflation, why should imaginary ones and zeroes in a set of files be magically ever endlessly growing investments?

You can't Hammer a bitcoin into jewelry. You can't build a house on top of your bitcoin. You can't eat a bitcoin. And unlike the similarly not inherently of some value dollar (which is just a scrap of paper when you get down to it) there's no nation of Bitopia with industry and a stable(ish) government to provide confidence in its coin. So yeah. I'm only surprised it has taken this long.

[ffutures]

Same here.

[cdybedahl]

Most of them went in front rather than followed. Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that's lost the _least_ in value in the past year. Ethereum, for example, has lost 93% since January this year.

And that's only if you choose to believe the numbers from the cryptocurrency community. In the more practical sense of "can you get actual real US dollars for those Bitcoin?", the given values are mostly fictional. Since nearly no banks are willing to touch the cryptocurrency exchanges with a barge pole, practically all of the trading the numbers are based on is one cryptocurrency for another. The amount of trade between a cryptocurrency and a real currency is microscopic.

If you feel like following the running farce that is the cryptocurrency world, I can recommend David Gerard's blog (https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/). His book "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain" is also excellent.

[ffutures]

None of this surprises me much. Bunch of idiots...

[dormouse1953]

I presume you remember the privatisation sell-offs share issues back in the eighties. Many people were subscribing to the share issues of each new privatised company and then selling the shares immediately to make a quick profit.

Someone, I think it was Mike Scott, said that this was a bubble and it was going to burst.

I worked with a guy who used to do this, and I mentioned the bubble to him. He pooh-poohed it.

Then, there was a big market crash in 1987 (just after the big storm in October, as I recall). Some company that was being privatised saw their share price drop below the price the shares were going to cost, wiping out any profit.

The guy I worked with blamed me for this. "I'd already spent the money I was going to get," he complained.

[ffutures]

Saw that one coming too, or at least guessed that there were too many privatisations going on and that the pool of investors might not be infinite.