It's easy to tell when the music has stopped. The hard part is anticipating the stopping.

Is it that easy? The Nasdaq bubble took roughly 6 years to inflate and 3 years to "pop". The real estate bubble took about 11 years to inflate and 6 years to fully deflate. Even Enron took the better part of a year to fully deflate.

Maybe balloon is a better word than bubble.

People who can't tell it has popped are the ones keeping it on life support for years. :-)

What do you think of the "buy low, sell high" strategy? ;-)

I've told people to buy at $3,800, $5,900, and $14,000 and got shouted down each time. All of these were after major crashes, so of course the price was about to bounce back.

Even if you know when the music hasn't stopped yet, it's very hard to get anyone to listen.

For what is worth, I also thought that ~5500 dip in mid november was a good time as well. I wish I had money in the exchange that weekend because it quickly recovered days afterward.

The recent dip was scarier though and time will tell whether we are still on the rise or just a temporary recovery.

A friend and I used to joke that a crash was a sale. Stock up while supplies last!

Oh boy... I told my dad to buy at $8, $27, $200, $2000, $3000, $6000, and $12000. None of these times has he actually taken any action. :(

If only I turned 18 a couple years earlier...

Your dad is a wise man!

On the other hand, if he had put in $8 at $8, he'd have $16,000 today.

It's easy to see in retrospect that the beginning of bitcoin would've been a good place to throw in some meaningless quantities of cash, but I think once you divide by the number of small, potential investments you could make that wouldn't have made you money, and subtract the amount of time commitment to keep track of those investments, the outcome is less appealing.

(Obviously, some people knew it was about explode, but I'm looking at everything you hear your kid, or a co-worker giving you hot tips about, which was the boat I was in and it sounds like this kid's dad was in).

Buying at $8 would be easy. Not selling at $200 would be hard. Not selling at $2000 would be even harder.

Good question. Many thought the music had stopped in 2014, when the price crashed from $1200 to less than $200. (Previously in 2011-2012 it crashed from $35 to less than $2, which was pre-ASICs, so you really couldn't mine at a profit)

It crashes during scandals like Mt Gox, and the big crash will come when a major nation-state decides to crack down on it.

Full disclosure: I don't own any Bitcoin, but I own other cryptocurrencies.

When you’re broke.

a lot more people sell than buy cryptocurrency

How would that work? Any coin that is bought is also sold, so you're saying that the buys come from a few people buying big amounts? But all those sellers were buyers at some point...

buyers are willing to trade USD for more bitcoins. the price might never go to zero, but it will approach it.