TechScape: I’m no longer making predictions about cryptocurrency. Here’s why
I’ve been writing about cryptocurrency for my entire career. In that time, one point I’ve always stuck to is simple: don’t listen to me for investment advice. Today, I want to quantify why.
Bitcoin was created in 2009, while I was in my first year at university. As an economics student – and massive nerd – it sat squarely at the intersection of my interests. By my final year of uni in 2011, the original cryptocurrency was experiencing its first boom and bust cycle. It rose from a low of $0.30 to a high of $32.34 that summer, before crashing back down to less than $3 when Mt. Gox, the original bitcoin exchange, was hacked. (This will become a theme.)
That was also the year the Guardian first covered the currency, with Ruth Whippman warning: “Its critics in the political sphere fear that it could give rise to an online Wild West of gambling, prostitution and global bazaars for contraband.”
I was very much on the outside looking in, though. Not being a regular drug user (cf “massive nerd”), the mainstream use of bitcoin – getting pills or weed delivered by post from the Silk Road – passed me by, so I found it more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else.
This is perhaps in part because the first thing I remember hearing about bitcoin was a tale, probably apocryphal, of someone using their gaming PC to mine the currency in their dorm room in a heatwave. The air conditioning failed, the user reported in a forum post, and heatstroke left them with mild brain damage. You can see why I was unimpressed.
By the second major boom, I was covering economics for the New Statesman. And that’s where the trouble starts.
In my first published piece using the word “bitcoin” – the first time the New Statesman had covered the topic – I
Read more on theguardian.com
