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It has all the earmarks of a bubble. The accidental alliteration makes it more attractive, but no more or less true. How to talk to your mom and dad about Bitcoin on Thanksgiving. In the space of a few short days, the cryptocurrency, which people mine on their powerful computers, has gained thousands of dollars of fresh value. A year-long Bitcoin value chart is the extreme version of a hockey stick curve.
But before you convert your life savings, consider the Beanie Baby Bubble, Tulip Mania, the Dot-Com Bubble, and even the more recent Housing Bubble, and how all of them shared certain attributes:. Mainstream newscasts are now covering Bitcoin, and there are more and more stories about people doing strange things to mine their own Bitcoin. Then there's the predictions. The Scottish journalist identified a pattern of irrational behavior in , a sort of mass hysteria that can seize a community real or virtual at any time.
In that book, Mackay wrote about the most notable case, Tulipmania, which occurred almost years ago. Just as Bitcoins value skyrocketed over a few weeks this fall, so did the price of tulips in Holland in the Fall of As with Bitcoin, the tulip trade was very real and arguably even better than Bitcoin.
At least with Tulips, you have a tangible object to obsess over. People made considerable sums in those first months of tulip mania. The tulip boom lasted long enough to generate new jobs around the industry, change the wealth of former paupers, and give rise to a new set of codes and laws for the tulip trade.
However, once the entire enterprise became about speculation buying and selling for a quick profit , Mackay wrote, the confidence in the Tulip market faltered, which resulted in a sudden drop in tulip value. People who grew tulips with a promise of a certain price at sale found that suddenly no one wanted to pay that price, since the value of these flowers changed from the time they started growing the colorful flowers.
Ultimately, the tulip bubble burst and many of those who were made rich by the enterprise lost it all. In more recent years, regular people have lost their minds over seemingly valueless objects, like Beanie Babies. Writing in Slate in , Mark Joseph Stern, described the mids rise and catastrophic collapse of these plush toys:. They were a mania, an obsession that ensnared not just gullible children but also otherwise responsible adults who lost all sense of perspective over these plush playthings.
For those like Stern who have a closet full of nearly worthless stuffed animals, that speculation did not pan out. People are putting in more money per Bitcoin, especially as the value rises, and the system is more programmatically controlled.
On the other hand, what is that demand based on? The world of retail and trade has yet to catch up with Bitcoin to let you use it in all the places you can spend hard cash. As a result, Bitcoin is currently a place you park your money and hope for it to accrue disproportionate value, which does sound a little more like Beanie Babies.
The dot-com bubble, which happened to coincide with Beanie Baby mania, has more in common with Bitcoin. Certainly, people believed that all those online businesses could attract customers and build wealth for all their investors. On the other hand, people invested and poured millions into many of these online businesses based on the misguided belief that the burn-rate how much cash they ate each month would eventually be matched by revenues and massive profit.
No one took a go-slow or cautious approach, even as worries increased. Eventually, like all good bubbles, the dot-com boom simply collapsed in on itself and took with it most than three-quarters of the value of the NASDAQ and countless web businesses, big and small.
What may be encouraging for Bitcoin watchers is that, as you surely know, online business did get its act together, rising out of the ashes to grow into the vibrant Internet we know today. It did not grow into another bubble As Stern pointed out: Right now, no one knows how much a Bitcoin should be worth.
Unlike a dollar, there are no factors signals that act directly upon it. These things do tend to follow a prescribed sequence of events, one that financial experts Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber described in their book Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. The authors wrote that some shock usually triggers the expansion the unexpected result of a Presidential election?
As soon as others follow suit, the decline accelerates. We're using cookies to improve your experience. Click Here to find out more. Tech Like Follow Follow.