Cryptocurrencies have been crashing again. Bitcoin has slumped to its lowest price in more than a year. More than $600bn in claimed “market capitalisation” has vanished from the universe of pseudo-money and digital tokens since early January.
A bit like the Burberry scarf, bitcoin has become a victim of its own success, with countless knock-offs undermining its value.
Bitcoin — the first and best known of the cryptocurrencies, created from clever mathematics and organised via a global computer network that sidesteps the banking system — is now priced at around $5,500. That’s a far cry from the all-time high of around $20,000 last December. Other cryptocurrencies have fared even worse. Ripple, the banker-friendly centralised cryptocurrency that gained more than 36,000 per cent in 2017, has lost about 85 per cent of its value since the start of 2018.