This article is crazy, and actually fills me with a little bit of schadenfreude.
Asset bubbles run on the bigger fool principle, and they end when you run out of bigger fools to sell to. If folks have really started cleaning out their bank accounts and borrowing money to buy bitcoins (an amount of bitcoins which, incidentally, you probably could have picked up for twenty bucks just six months ago) then it seems to me that the world is about to run out of bigger fools.
Far from it because right now this is only being discussed in Hacker News... not in USA Today or FarmVille. However one defines "fools", I don't see a shortage. That said, I'm not invested, only observing here.
However one defines "fools", I don't see a shortage.
In this particular case, foolishness is denoted merely by their willingness to pay high prices for bitcoins. While there may be out there in the general population plenty of people objectively more foolish than this guy, they're less likely to fall for this.
This is the other big problem I have with bitcoin: it seems to exist in a very insular, very geeky world filled with people who don't really understand the non-geek world out there. Bitcoin will never really jump from the geek world to the real world, because the general population won't even understand its supposed benefits, much less give a damn about them. A few geeks may be able to talk their poor grandmas into buying some, but that's about it for general market penetration.
But then, so was 15 years ago that whole Internet thing "too geeky", very insular with no connection to the non-geek world out there. So I suppose the BTC crowd sees that as a promising beginning.
Asset bubbles run on the bigger fool principle, and they end when you run out of bigger fools to sell to. If folks have really started cleaning out their bank accounts and borrowing money to buy bitcoins (an amount of bitcoins which, incidentally, you probably could have picked up for twenty bucks just six months ago) then it seems to me that the world is about to run out of bigger fools.