, Columnist
Bitcoin’s Crash Looks Like a Real Currency Crisis
In a virtual world without a central bank, who is the buyer of last resort?
Bitcoins.
Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images EuropeThis article is for subscribers only.
Bitcoin is in crisis. You can never really declare it dead — the idea of an electronic currency that is theoretically borderless and lawless will always live on somewhere — but its price has slumped 80 percent in less than a year, wiping about $700 billion off cryptocurrency markets.
Where does it go from here? True believers are betting on a simple repeat of past asset bubbles, like dot-com stocks or real estate: a system-wide cleansing of bad actors before the roller-coaster ride begins anew. On that argument there’s a price for everything, even niche assets with no intrinsic value. Maybe Bitcoin should be above $3,700.