How to summarise watching not just Bitcoin, but a large bucket of other cryptocurrencies, have a $9 billion crash in the late summer of 2022? I don’t like cryptocurrencies, as I think regular readers will have realised: safe to say that a frisson of schadenfreude was in order as the so-called crash took place, with formerly optimistic traders wondering if this was the Beginning of the End.
Answering that question isn’t terribly difficult, particularly if you understand the techno-economics jargon and a readiness to type multiple-word queries into search engines. After a few minutes of prodding and poking at the less hysterical, more day-to-day bits of the net, I had a few answers.
Perhaps the most useful explanation is that the entire market in all the cryptocurrencies added together is broadly agreed to be around $1 trillion. That means the overall loss in the most recent crash, which sounds impressive at $9 billion, is still less than 1% of the market valuation. Most currencies (crypto or traditional) go through shifts in valuation like this without all the accompanying brouhaha that seems to attend crypto-anything.
Fear not, I don’t intend to while away three pages just gloating about crypto: there’s another angle to all this. Many people forget that all cryptocurrencies depend
