A case of balls to the wall

It was late in 2017 when investors of a certain age began to suffer the symptoms of cryptoglaze. This involved a general shutdown of the synapses occasioned by a lecture from a true believer about why crypto was going to take over the world, why blockchain was the most important invention since the wheel and why fiat currencies were about as much use as Fiat cars from the mid1970s. Cryptoglaze was useful because it allowed the sufferer to bear the brunt of the lecture while offering no more than the occasional grunt in return, but while the price of bitcoin and its more esoteric compadres continued to fly, the true believers were in the ascendant.

Until, of course, it crashed, which it has been doing with remarkable vigour all year. This is not just the sort of low-speed fender-bender that you might see in the more mild-mannered suburban car park, it’s a balls to the wall, high-octane Formula One explosion from the era before anybody had even thought of safety regulations. Bitcoin has plummeted from not far shy of $20,000 to just over $3,000, and there’s no sign of anybody stepping in to stop the rout.

Commentators such as Nouriel Roubini have been having a field day, describing crypto as “the mother and father of all scams and bubbles”, and blockchain as “the most over-hyped and least useful technology in human history”, while predicting that bitcoin should drop to zero, if not slightly lower, due to the negative environmental effect of mining the coins. Whatever else you might say about crypto, it certainly delivers in the white-knuckle department.