BITCOIN DIARY: Who really got hammered by the Bitcoin bust?
'If you’ve owned cryptocurrency for a long time, the big price drop hasn’t hit your net worth very hard - Bitcoin’s price is back to the same level as in November'
Welcome, dear average investor, to the lovely world of unregulated retail finance. Perhaps you’re young enough that you missed the tech-stock housing bubbles. Perhaps you didn’t have enough cash to “flip that house” back in 2006. Well, thanks to the invention of cryptocurrency, there’s a whole new way for you to lose your life’s savings. Plunges in the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have sent about $400 billion of paper wealth vanishing into thin air. Since its peak, Bitcoin has lost about $200 billion in market capitalization, and Ethereum about $67 billion: If you’ve owned cryptocurrency for a long time, the big price drop hasn’t hit your net worth very hard -- Bitcoin’s price is back to the same level as in November, while Ethereum is still up a good deal since that time. But that $400 billion of evaporated wealth had to have hurt a lot of people. If you bought in December or January, you’ve taken a big hit. Some of the losses have been taken by early investo...
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