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Comment by shusson | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried because family and friends of mine who are not tech oriented at all, are buying bitcoin as investments. They are my canary in the coal mine.

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Yup. I've got the same canary dying at this point. Work colleagues are asking me "which crypto" they should buy.

4 years ago, when btc hit $1000, it was my uncle who asked me to buy a couple. A few months later it dropped to $300.

Crypto currencies feel a lot more mainstream this time around. It makes me worried that a crash could actually impact the "real" (as in non-crypto) economy.

Did he ask you to sell those couple B at $20000 recently? Well, even if he did not then, selling at $13000 now isn't that bad either.

In your uncle's defense, buying bitcoin at $1000 turned out to be a huge bargain.

In hindsight, yeah, but you can't predict the future. I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. Bitcoin collapses, for example due to the transaction costs and time. If the miners pull out the network dies.

At $1,000 the economist hat a story on bitcoin which probably caused (some of) the following rise and crash shortly after. This time the buyer base is much larger (low yields on nearly everything else) but bitcoin has already been struggling to keep its value in recent weeks.

Same here, a lot of my non tech friends are trading cryptocurrency parroting the technobabble in the ICO whitepapers without any understanding of the technical basics.

Short it all and profit then right?

Successful shorting is only possible if you can predict the timing of the collapse, if you could do that you might just as well play the regular pyramid game (and then start shorting on the way out, for maximum gambling reward)

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