The question to ask is where will the money come from? The last bubble was all over TV, it was a constant part of the news cycle and everybody knows somebody who bought at least some crypto currency based on promises of wild riches. Most of those people have lost at least some (or even most) of the money they “invested”. When the layman has already been burned, where can money come from?

People often make the mistakes more than once so perhaps there’s room for “this time it’s different!” but I’m not convinced. I don’t see the crypto market ever exceeding the previous all time high.

There’s certainly room for individual cryptocurrency projects to succeed from their own merit as projects that happen to be crypto currencies so I don’t think all crypto currencies are dead forever but crypto as a growth market almost certainly is.

I agree, I think the last bubble was when everyone was talking about it. Everyone wanted a piece and people were buying bitcoin hearing about the massive gains. I guess that's when the whales took profit.

The focus now by the whales to broaden the ~~sucker~~ buyer base via the ETF's.

The blockchain buzz has also been correlated to the bitcoin price. Both seem to have gone done.

I expect the money will come from Wall Street once adequate custodial / regulatory framework is in place.

Wall Street wants to trust it's money to miners in China? The whole mining concept is ridiculous, but they have probably done stupider things so it could happen.

> Wall Street wants to trust it's money to miners in China?

No, but it will happily take a commission selling you a Bitcoin or Bitcoin derivative.

The latest Trace Mayer podcast is worth a listen: "Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long discusses the sixth network effect of financialization with Wall Street and institutional investors." https://www.bitcoin.kn/

Also Bitmain is basically insolvent.

It could be a little of both additional supplies of late-to-the-party money have finally found their way to this market, amplified by the ongoing process of coin concentration into fewer and fewer hands. Both factors (with a little help from breakage and block reward subsidy tail-off schedules) constrain liquidity and thus drive up the price. But it makes for a very distorted "market cap." Fiction, leavened by just enough fact, feeds an eager fantasy, which feeds back into more fiction. Last one out the door gets to hold the very real bags.

Bitcoin is surprisingly resilient; getting to the last bubble would imply running out of dumb retail investor money. Plus the darknets and ransomware seem still to be in business with cryptocurrency.

I'd expect repeating smaller bubbles every few months.

I think this bubble was different and rather like the 1999/2000 dot com bubble. Some real companies like Google and Facebook rose from the rubble but the situation where any stupid thing with .com on the name could float for a fortune never returned. I imagine crypto will play out something like that with the stupid ICOs gone but some real stuff of value coming about. I'm guessing bitcoin is like Yahoo - it will continue but the flaws will do for it eventually.