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Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

Since everybody and their grandmother is telling these days it's a bubble, I've somehow come to the believe that this time it's not a bubble. Why?

Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble. Perhaps it was 5% - 10%. At least this was what appeared in the news. The big shots at the central banks didn't see this bubble either, for the most part. But now every big banker is saying Bitcoin is a bubble.

For the dot-com bubble it was much the same. The majority of people (economists, bankers and the like) that should recognise a bubble were only able to call it a bubble in hindsight.

The more I hear this is a bubble, the more of my spare money I will invest into cryptos.

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> Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble.

During the mortgage crisis, basically every notable economist and economic commentator was calling it a bubble; some had been for several years, and some only very late (but still before it popped), but it absolutely is not the case that the concept was rare my stated.

The closest your statement is to truth is that there weren't lots of people accurately predicting the timing of the bubble popping, but that's a different thing than recognizing the bubble.

> For the dot-com bubble it was much the same.

It's true that he dot-com bubble was much the same as the mortgage bubble, but only in that it equally did not match your “no one was calling it a bubble” description.

At the height of the dotcom bubble, people were very widely calling it an insane bubble.

I read just about every financial story about it that came out during those ~2.5 years it lasted (the actual bubble was short lived). It was fairly evenly split between two camps, one represented by the bubble pumpers calling it the new economy (or different this time; they had lots of bumper sticker sayings), the other by traditionalists focused on relatively normal valuation metrics. Guess who prevailed. Warren Buffett, as always. Nearly all of the public dotcoms collapsed or were liquidated for pennies on the dollar. Few survived and thrived, Amazon barely made it out alive. Those thousand crypto coins? They will not survive. A few will, and they'll thrive - thrive meaning, they'll be lucky to be worth what they are today, in another ten years.

This seems like confirmation bias to me. How many bubbles or fads were called by people that evaporated (beanie babies, troll dolls, etc)?

What makes me certain it's a bubble is all the stories my wife tells me of people from her native Malaysia. Her mother wants to buy in, her mothers friends want to buy in, people take out their pension funds for it, a guy sold his profitable albeit small restaurant to go all-in on bitcoin and so on.

Now it's somewhat understandable given the fact that Malaysias currency has not been very stable in recent years and people are struggling. But people investing all they have into such a volatile market is going to lead to a rude awakening.

Only if you are talking with reasonable people. If you were inside the crypto-groups, you'll know that this is a bubble.

The type of investor behavior described here is emblematic of a bubble :

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-cr...

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