Skip to content
Subscriber Only
Opinion
Noah Smith

Yep, Bitcoin Was a Bubble. And It Popped.

Millennials, like generations before them, just got a painful lesson about speculation.

Chasing pretty bubbles.

Chasing pretty bubbles.

Source: Barcroft Media/Getty Images
From

It seems like every asset bubble has a famous anecdote of someone claiming, right at the top, that a crash is impossible. In the stock-market bubble leading up to the Great Depression, it was economist Irving Fisher, who declared in the New York Times that stocks “have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” a few days before a collapse that would see stocks lose 89 percent of their value. In 2007 and 2008, many optimistic pronouncements by current National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow turned out to be disastrously wrong.

In the great Bitcoin bubble of late 2017, the honor goes to John McAfee, founder of computer security company McAfee LLC, and passionate cryptocurrency evangelist. On Dec 7, 2017, he wrote: