Blockchain, Crypto, and Hysteria
It was late fall, 2017, at the height of cryptocurrency mania. Bitcoin was a seemingly unstoppable rocket to the moon to an eventual peak of $18,000 US per coin. People sold all of their possessions, including family homes, in a frenzy to buy a few bits associated with an address on a global ledger.
I had flown into Las Vegas for a conference when I first realized this boiler was primed to explode. The biggest online wallet for storing cryptocurrencies, Coinbase, was on pace to become the first legitimate crypto unicorn based solely on buying and selling an unproven digital currency that was both highly insecure (the successful hacks were too numerous to track) and a terrible currency (a volatile currency is hardly useful). Upon learning that I was in the technology business, my Uber driver from the airport asked if he should buy Bitcoin or Litecoin. By November 2017, those coins were pretty pedestrian choices. When I arrived at my destination, although the conference was ostensibly about cloud technologies, the only topic of conversation were so-called altcoins, namely, Ripple (XRP), which was trading at 25￠ per coin. Five weeks later it would trade at $3.80 each, an over 1500% ROI in the time it takes to get a tax refund.
It was clearly a bubble, but how high would it go before the dip, and how far would it crash when it did?... more