The Black Investors Who Were Burned by Bitcoin
Two years ago, a Maryland-based information-technology specialist—who asked to remain anonymous for reasons that will become apparent in a minute—started researching bitcoin in earnest. He’d seen the ubiquitous advertisements for it, he told me. He had a background in computer science and was interested in cryptography. He saw the promise of the blockchain, bitcoin’s distributed-transactions ledger. And he had watched the astonishing rally in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. “I wanted to see how far it would go,” he told me.
He put in $1,000. Shortly after, the crypto markets began to falter. He started to lose money and decided to pull out rather than risk losing any more. “I got a good sense of what it was all about,” he told me.
The IT specialist is one of thousands of American investors who have seen their savings disappear into the ether proponents are calling a “crypto winter.” The price of a single bitcoin has plummeted from a peak of more than $68,000 last November to about $16,000 today; the of the crypto-trading firm FTX earlier this month sent prices lower than they were in 2017. Cryptocurrencies as a whole have lost more than in paper value in the past year.
