Illustration: Lazaro Gamio / Axios
Bitcoin is up about 1,700% since the start of the year. Some attribute the surge to ordinary, if enthusiastic, investment, along with the forces of supply and demand. Others say it's a bubble, and that it will ultimately burst. Joe Borg, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a grouping of state securities officials, suggests it's the latter. "This is a casino," he tells Axios, "not an investment."
The bottom line: Borg, who is also director of the Alabama Securities Commission, says he could be wrong and that those who say bitcoin is just "another type of investment" will be proven correct. But he sees worrying signs of a classic investment mania.
Among the signs:
- People have told him they have taken out home equity lines of credit to buy bitcoin.
- Those doing so, he said, are mostly millennials and young baby boomers.
- "They seem to think anything electronic is a game," Borg said. "There are entrepreneurs who run Facebook, and they put this in the same category."
Thought bubble: If bitcoin collapses, which has been the normal course in big, sudden investment manias, the price is highly unlikely to go to zero, meaning a lot of people will still be in the money. But lots of people will lose, too, including perhaps some who have taken out those home equity lines of credit.
That there is a fever is indisputable. It is global, and especially heavy in Asia. Ordinary South Koreans are the most aggressive bitcoin investors, in addition to Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese, report the WSJ's Steven Russolillo and Eun-Young Jeong. Together, they account for almost 80% of global bitcoin trading. Other reminders of fevers past:
- Most of these Asians buying bitcoin are the general public, not professional traders.
- At the point last week when bitcoin went above $17,000, it was almost $25,000 in South Korea, almost 50% higher, the WSJ said. In other words, the trade is chaotic to the point of irrationality.
- At the FT, Izabella Kaminska writes today that even central banks are "getting drunk on the collective cryptocurrency/blockchain Kool-Aid."
A point that increasing numbers of observers are making is that bitcoin is only an investment, with no other real-life, large-scale utility, at least at present: bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are too slow and cumbersome to serve as money, their original purpose.
- In a speech today in Sydney, Phillip Lowe, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, makes the point: "The current fascination with these currencies feels more like a speculative mania than it has to do with their use as an efficient and convenient form of electronic payment."