The rise and fall of Bitcoin
THE great Sir Isaac Newton may have revolutionised our knowledge of the world but he still had his blind spots. He was sucked into the great mania of his day, the South Sea Bubble (pictured) and lost a lot of money. “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people” he ruefully reflected. In retrospect, he should have pondered the popular saying that was used to define his law of gravity: “What goes up, must come down”.
Investors in Bitcoin are learning this old truth. The price of the cryptocurrency peaked last month at somewhere over $19,000 (there is a very wide spread, a problem in itself) but, at the time of writing (around 11am GMT), some exchanges now show a price below $10,000.
Perhaps the best way of understanding bitcoin is through a model of how bubbles operate. The classic model, developed by Hyman Minsky and elaborated by Charles Kindleberger, a historian who studied bubbles, has five stages:…
