Why Bitcoin falls down

Why Bitcoin Falls Down.

Remember the mantra. Tech innovations swing between the extremes of meme and electricity. Memes are human sentiment, the animal spirits of the market shooting up and crashing down. Yahoo message boards, Reddit posts, Telegram communities, excited media articles. Electricity, however, is real. It’s discovery and taming led to an industrial revolution, light and progress. Today’s laundromats might be boring and tame, but imagine the first robotic clothes washer animated by electric powers unseen. All tech innovations have a bit of each. Crypto is enjoying its meme moment. Why is Bitcoin going down, after it went up? Let’s talk about the factors that are adding up to the current sentiment.

(1) The first is definitional — Bitcoin (and all crypto) is a volatile early stage technology asset and these massive run-ups and falls are a feature of the asset class, not an exception.

(2) The second is that data points about hacks and Ponzi schemes have been dominating the news. From Tether (which may be trying to print billions of sovereign currency) to Bitconnect (likely Ponzi scheme with a proprietary coin falling from $2.6 billion in marketcap) the Coincheck hack ($500 million Japanese exchange hack), to Arise Bank ($600 million ICO shutdown by the SEC), billions of USD equivalent value keep are literally evaporating from the crypto economy due to bad actors. These issues are not new in the space, but now there is mainstream attention with nearly at trillion at stake, and the regulators are starting in enforcement actions.

(3) The futures market that so many crypto natives were excited about allow professional investors to actually take a bearish view. Oops. This sentiment should reflect back into the price mechanically.

(4) Decentralized systems will supposedly erode the control of centralized systems. So we should not be surprised when centralized systems fight back when coopted for this purpose — from Facebook’s Bitcoin ad block and regulator crackdown on fake bots, to the refusal of credit card issuers and banks to keep financing crypto purchases, to asset managers like Vanguard announcing they won’t create vehicles for the asset class.

None of this should be new information. If in 2002 you asked the music labels whether they like Napster, not only would they answer with a resounding NO, but they would talk about Digital Rights Management and all their plans to fight back. Welcome to creating product-market fit.

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