STRAIGHT TALK
MARK BARNES: Whether bitcoin will be king remains unclear, so don’t rush to bet your savings on it just yet
There’s been a lot more than doubling going on and there could be plenty of trouble to come (or not)
I thought that if I didn’t write something on bitcoin, I might lose my columnist licence, so here goes. "Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble," go the words from the song of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as they sought to predict the future of Macbeth, who would be king. There’s been a lot more than doubling going on and there could be plenty of trouble to come (or not), so perhaps these old hags could gather again to conjure up the future of bitcoin — their predictions could be as reliable as the many others doing the rounds. The debates have progressed beyond the origin, uses and applications of bitcoin — we just want to know if it’s a bubble, so we can jump in or out. A bubble occurs when the price of an asset, spurred on by typically unfounded, if not completely misunderstood, enthusiasm, way exceeds any measure of its intrinsic value. Tick that box. The bitcoin price increase has been measured in thousands of annualised percentage points and la...
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