Okay, we have a confession to make: we may have accidentally dropped the bitcoin price a few days ago.
First, we published a piece on Her Majesty the Queen apparently expressing interest in blockchain. She was sent a copy of “a peer-reviewed blockchain journal” (!) And her private secretary replied that our Liz was “interested in learning that the publication is the first open access blockchain publishing research journal available in print and online. ”. We must now inform you that it is supposed to be a bit of a joke. We were not convinced that our 94-year-old monarchy was in fact that interest in Byzantine Deficiency Tolerance and proof-of-work mechanisms.
But some people were very excited about it nonetheless. CEO of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, tweet our story saying “I wonder how much #Bitcoin it has. The Express state in a caption: The Queen left delighted after learning about Bitcoin after receiving a bizarre gift. Business Insider he added vital context by stating when writing the story: “It’s unclear whether the queen had any prior knowledge of blockchain before receiving the journal.” (Let’s be honest: we’re still not sure that the Queen now has such “blockchain information”.)
And then later on Tuesday Alphaville editor Izabella Kaminska wrote the Original Bitcoin Cynic, an op-ed for the FT in which she appeared to be undergoing some kind of Damascene transformation, arguing that “bitcoin o ‘ r finally finding logic in dooms day scenarios ”. (She hadn’t really had any such transformation; she noted that all her doubts remained, but in the “far-reaching” scenario of a future dystopian reality where the world has slipped into authorship, bitcoin could act as a type of hedge.)
(There was also a genuine Alphavillain Tracy Alloway Damascene conversion a few days earlier.)
We fear that together – and in particular, we suspect, HM the Queen – we may have sent bitcoin a moon. Bitcoin jumped around $ 1,000 on Tuesday, climbing above $ 19,000 to its highest since bitcoin-manic days of December 2017. On Wednesday it rose a little further to the highest $ 19,500, just shy of its all-time high of about $ 19,666 (depending on which exchange you’re going with).
And now, many are going down! At pixel time, bitcoin had slipped about 10 percent at around $ 17,200. Here is a chart showing last week’s price movements, courtesy of Coindesk:
The last time we looked, Ethereum was also down 13 percent on the day; XRP had lost 21 percent.
We are not going to argue – and never will – argue that bitcoin will never rise to such heights. Maybe, but then again it might not. With no essentials to judge the price on, it is based, as we have said many times before, on speculation. Sometimes it does well when risk appetite is low; sometimes he does poorly. That all makes the price almost impossible to predict.
But we feel we could have triggered The Top for now at least. And to all those bitcoin bros * who have been desperately telling their followers things like this:
We can only apologize. We hope you enjoy your carnivorous Thanksgiving dinners despite today’s dive.
* NB: not all of those we who consider bitcoin bros self-identify as bitcoin bros.