Bitcoin: A symptom of market mania or the new gold?
10 Jan, 2021 07:34 PM
6 minutes to read
Bitcoin is muscling in on a space long occupied by gold. Photo / Getty Images
Financial Times
By: Merryn Somerset Webb
The price of bitcoin has soared eightfold since March. It was US$5,000 (NZ$6,900) a coin then. It was over US$40,000 (NZ$55,000) this week. It is one of the best-performing things you could have held since the pandemic began. That will have felt great for its early adopters. But it now leaves pretty much everyone in the markets in something of a quandary.
Do we buy or do we sell? This is the royal we . . . my own bitcoin holding is not big enough to bother selling. Is the exponential rise in the price of bitcoin yet another symptom of the outbreak of speculative mania in markets, a spillover from the rampant overvaluation of the US tech sector that will eventually prove to have no intrinsic value at all and fall to zero or thereabouts?
What did Silicon Valley s crypto bubble create?
1 Jan, 2021 04:00 AM
6 minutes to read
Crypto projects could include large-scale data storage, use of blockchain to ensure better contracts and payment for artists and new digital financial products. Photo / Getty Images
Financial Times
By: Richard Waters in San Francisco Three years ago, when the blockchain start-up Filecoin raised $257m with nothing more than a promise to build a decentralised marketplace for data storage, it looked like another example of the mania that was sweeping through the cryptocurrency world.
At the time, investors were pouring an estimated $20bn into so-called Initial Coin Offerings sales of new digital tokens by projects which, like Filecoin, claimed to be building important new digital infrastructure. Many have since sunk without a trace, and ICOs quickly went out of fashion.