So. Is the Great Cryptocurrency Bubble of 2017 over?

A number of young cryptocurrency investors on Youtube appear to think so.  And how!  A series of videos not unreminiscent  of campus selfies of crushed Hillary supporters in the wake of Trump have appeared, and everywhere one witnesses howls and wails, weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It’s understandable.  March, April and May of this year was a historic boom in terms of cryptocurrency investments and prices.  By May, Bitcoin not only broke the $2,000 margin for the first time, but seemed to reach a new historic price level first each day.  Alt coins unknown to the general public made staggering gains.  Everything seemed to be rising all all at once.

Yes, children, you can say you were there when Ripple rose not seventeen percent but seventeen times its value in barely a week; when Digibyte shot even higher even faster.  I myself thought $600 a nicely piddling amount to place on Digibyte; up it roared to $57,000 in a matter of days.  Who can blame newbie investors for being astounded and intoxicated?  Or crushed, when down prices came tumbling.

But is it apocalypse?  The end of Bitcoin?  Not even remotely.

In fact, it isn’t even a bad thing.

It is axiomatic among investors that at some point, when prices rise, profit-takers will move in and take some profit.  Watching the price rise is fun, but they know it can’t go up forever, and besides, they have their eye on that Corvette.  Of course they’re going to sell part of their gains.

Unfortunately, when they do, the herd see prices fall, and panic, and follow suit, not withdrawing part of their profits, but in fear and trembling dissolving it all.  And too, now there are bots.  When prices fall, machines sell, with no human hand present to set the brake.

The result is a fast and deep price dump, and inexperienced investors, watching the $2,800 Bitcoin they purchased fall to $2,000 again, and below, turn pale, sell at a loss, and vow never to invest again.

They’re fools.  It isn’t simply that Bitcoin is today again at $2,200, a historic high as recently as last week.  That’s a drop, but it isn’t Gotterdammerung.  Anyone who bought Bitcoin for under a thousand at the start of the year has ever reason to be happy.

More than that, though, i’s also a lack of history.  Older hands remember when Bitcoin was at $1,200, dropped to $400, then rose back to $800 in the blink of an eye.  The very first “crash” of Bitcoin was on April 11, 2013.  On April 10, it reached a historic high of $266.  The next day it fell to $135.  Investors cursed it and sold.  Now it’s roughly ten times the value it was then.

As with Bitcoin, so with Ethereum, and a whole range of coins.  The carnage of last week appears to have settled for the moment, and the result is not a blasted landscape but coins not terribly distant from their earlier highs.

The question is, are the new prices a new floor?  Or will prices tumble further?  Or will we see a similar extraordinary rise?

My guess is — all of the above.  The truly worthless memecoins will tumble further, hopefully unto deletion, but then worthlessness eventually finds its own level in every market.  The wilder investors have washed out with them for the moment, but the canny ones are buying coins at bargain prices, and the less expert investors who were singed but not burned, the interested but not yet wealthy, are investing more slowly and carefully now that they’re somewhat reduced now in funds and wary.

Sense is re-asserting itself, in short, which is all to the good.  So, most likely we will continue to see incremental gains till mania seizes the crowd again.  Which it will.

Till then?  I would shop for bargains.  At the moment, they abound.