It's all relative to something. During the Wall Street crash in 1929, Dow fell down only ~30%. Bitcoin lost ~70% from the peak. It's definitely a bust. (as in fall in value / no growth) You could say instead that it's just back to normal value after a period of abnormal pricing - but then what kind of asset has so much uncertainty that people can pump up the price 4-5x for months?
Maybe it’s higher variance and higher expected value than the stock market. I don’t believe that but it’s certainly a conclusion you could draw from the price action. The overall return since inception is much better than the stock market at any similar time frame in history, even after multiple >50% pullbacks.
> Bitcoin’s critics say the digital tokens are like the tulip bulbs of 17th-century Holland. They generated a wild, speculative rush that quickly disappeared, leaving behind nothing but pretty flowers and wrecked bank accounts
Which Tulip bubble? The small one that actually happened and was largely a small group of wealthy people trying to outdo each other, or Mackay’s wildly exaggerated account that has seeped into popular legend?
I wonder how many people bought at 19K USD (or anything between 5.5K and 19K) and are now in the red, or indeed if they bought at e.g. 19K and sold at 15K, swallowing 4K of losses.
For sure there are Lamborghinis out there bought with people's retirement money.
Is it really that different from the housing bubble that popped in 2008? Leading up to that point plenty of people bought houses they couldn't afford with large loans from banks, on the idea of getting rich in a short time.
While I agree with your sentiment, housing has the advantage of being directly useful in and of itself. It’s bad to lose 20% of a $200k house, but it’s still saving you rent and is a long-term wage-inflation-matching (not, and cannot be, wage-beating in the long term) asset.
I wonder how many people bought into SNAP or Blue Apron stock, and are in the red.
For sure, the founders of startups bought a lot of lambos with retail investors’ money, and the original VC’s dumped their equity on IPO day on the masses.
I lost 90% of the value of my Lloyds shares. I’m fine, of course, but just because other things are worse doesn’t make a bad thing into a good thing. As for ‘deserves’… there’s a reason why speculation on financial products is something banks and governments don’t want J. Average to do.
> For sure there are Lamborghinis out there bought with people's retirement money.
Oh yes, but sociopaths and foolish greed are not bitcoin-specific.
Bitcoin seems to annoy people at some fundamental level that I do not understand. Perhaps because it exposes that all money is an abstraction, that it really rests on nothing except some social narrative that we all share?
2009: Bitcoin is a nerdy pipe-dream. It will never be worth anything!
2011: Ok, bitcoin is worth something, but it is only used by drug dealers on the dark web.
2017: OMG I'm going to buy bitcoin and get rich!
2019: Bitcoin is worth nothing, exactly like the tulips, told you so!
2022: ...
etc etc
Thinking about cryptocurrencies by following the latest wave of hype is the way to neurosis. As with anything involving money & investments, I suspect.
At the moment I am writing this 1BTC ~= 5K Euros. This is only considered bad because there was am unsustainable spike when greed went viral. I suspect more events like this will come. Who cares what the trend-followers think?
They could be like Tulips and still do ok. Global flower sales are $67bn and that's product to end customers, not just speculators flipping things to each other.
Yes, easily. And the existence of an intermediary isn't a disqualifier. You're still sending USD when you send someone USD over Paypal, you're still sending Bitcoin when you send someone Bitcoin over Coinbase.
Bitcoin is responsible for moving hundreds of millions of dollars every single day[1]. That is not a reasonable definition of "failure". Similarly, your gran using it is not a singular definition of success.
Penny stocks have market volume too. The only difference is that penny stocks don’t pretend their trading volume is an indicator of some inherent utility because of a whitepaper ten years ago.
Funny but not clever. As any lottery or casino can show you, there's a lot of value in the right random numbers, it all depends on what you use them for.
If bitcoin has value it is only because the randomness is one of the methods used to make the bitcoin useful. Some usefulness appears to be there as is demonstrated by the real life usage of the bitcoin.
The point is that even a small 1-2% of all transactions would still be a huge amount.
The question that we should ask is if bitcoin serves to a market need. From what I have seen, yes it does, though banks did react back when bitcoin started to gain traction and for example here in Sweden a free service to send and receive money instantaneously through a mobile app became extremely popular. Now the banks are trying to introduce fees into that service, and time will tell if the market will tolerate it, or if it will slowly fall in popularity until another free alternative (like bitcoin) replaces it.
Did banks introduce money sending services via mobile apps in the last decade because a handful of people acquired a speculative digital asset that isn't actually capable of free, instant transactions, or because the average person acquired a smartphone?
What does "handful of people acquired a speculative digital asset" have to do with the market need of "send and receive money digitally"?
There reason people want to send and receive money digitally has many sources. The cashless society change that Swedish governments and bank started a while back created a need for digital alternatives for activities that previously used physical cash. Transactions between individuals, flea markets, collections at church services, fees for clubs, sale of drinks/food at events. Credit cards are costly, includes minimum fees and use systems that tend to be slow and hard to use. A church collection does not work if a 1$ donation cost 1$ in credit card fees. Even donation services today like patreon currently looks down at such low donations as all the money get eaten by the credit card fees.
The benefits that people who advocated for Bitcoin in the early days talked about was mostly those. Ease of use. Cheap. Physical cash alternative. It was a time where paypall was the only alternative to credit cards and for many places the only way to pay unless you used direct bank transfer that take a minimum of 1 weekday transaction time.
Smartphone penetration is a relevant factor, but it was not the only one. The new bank service fulfilled a need which credit cards and paypall both did a poor job with. The question is if banks/government are willing to continue support what the market needs, or if systems like bitcoin will utilize the hole that remains when physical money is phased out.
Can't say I'm an expert in the Swedish situation specifically, but I'd think the fact that every other European banking system was already working on free instant bank transfers in the 2000s and smartphone penetration probably had more impact on instant krona transactions via smartphones than cryptonerds hyping their low-penetration speculative asset that doesn't actually do fee-free instant transactions as the future of money. It's not as if the average church is or was better set up to take collections in Bitcoin than credit cards anyway...
The fact that so many Wall Street types flocked to these cryptos solely because it is/was an unregulated market that they could manipulate speaks volumes about what it really is.
If you are a software entrepreneur, raising money by selling digital assets (“tokens”) is a legitimate option that flips VC on its head with instant liquidity and value based on the success of the network.
Ethereum raised $15 million to fund their network, which now has a market cap around $18 billion.
Cosmos launched their mainnet yesterday, and now has a market cap over $1 billion. All of the employees can exit if they choose, who were given tokens rather than illiquid stock.
To be perfectly honest, this is a much fairer system for the average employee at a startup than our current ISO situation, where employees are diluted, forced to pay ridiculous AMT taxes on exercise, and basically screwed by the founders.
That's assuming there are enough willing buyers around who'll offer them cash for those tokens. I don't know anything about Cosmos in particular, but it often seems much easier to find facilities for exchanging fiat money for crypto tokens of some kind than vice versa.
Obviously, someone is selling the tokens and getting real money in exchange, but if we don't all have equal access to that market as sellers, something smells fishy...
They did an ICO a few years ago, and 1100 people bought in at 10 cents. Now they can sell at $4.50. Not a bad return, and they actually delivered a valuable product, which is shows not every ICO was a scam.
I'm not seeing a product there, just another page full of blurb about frameworks and blockchains layered upon blockchains.
After scanning the front page I'm no wiser as to what they're trying to deliver, what problems are addressed, what any use-cases might be. I'm getting the exact same architecture-astronaut feeling I get about most blockchain companies.
We have a highly scalable bar of interconnected, interchangeable fleems which will allow flurbles to foo more efficiently and faster!
We are still in the "creating the low-level protocols" phase of blockchain development, but essentially Cosmos is an SDK to create Proof of Stake blockchains easily, which has traditionally been extremely difficult. Then their SDK allows each chain to communicate easily, which is another extremely difficult feature.
I work professionally in the space, and not understanding nitty gritty blockchain protocols is like saying you don't understand how audio drivers work, or media codecs, or database locking mechanisms. You won't understand it unless you put the time in to study it.
Cosmos is a very interesting and novel technology, and it makes creating an application-specific blockchain perhaps 100x easier (2 orders of magnitude).
I'm not claiming this is my specialism, just contrasting the claims of a delivered product with a webpage full of nebulous uncertainties.
I mean, to say that this project has delivered where others haven't, yet say what it has delivered is yet more blockchain infrastructure is odd to me. I could, sure, I could put in the time to learn the ins and outs of these protocols as you say, but I'm not sure why I would absent any actual use cases. And I'm not seeing any here -
It makes flurbing the flooz 100x easier!
OK, so .. what use is the flooz?
This question is still unanswered AFAICT, and cosmos does nothing to answer it. Or at least its front page does nothing to answer it or anything much else.
The same use cases as always - decentralized applications with no central authority operating it, scarce digital assets, global money transfer, elimination of middlemen, and so on.
Of course, skeptics such as yourself will say, "all of that is worthless!" But I could not disagree more.
An extremely complex subject, but the tokens are used as the network utility function. You must pay to use the network in ETH for Ethereum or ATOMS for Cosmos. The SEC officially stated Ethereum is not a security, and the NYDFS allows BitLicense exchanges such as Gemini to trade ETH, so the market is confident it’s not a security.
> If you are a software entrepreneur, raising money by selling digital assets (“tokens”) is a legitimate option
Is it?
I would say that's not really been shown yet. The vast majority of ICOs have absolutely nothing to show for it, many may well face SEC and other body legal proceedings in the coming years, and the bottom seems to have dropped out of the market.
> Cosmos launched their mainnet yesterday, and now has a market cap over $1 billion
bitcoins are real estate. a transmission of these coins allows metadata on the most indisputable source of data on this planet. it can never be faked and it is forever. that is the true value.
I knew about Bitcoin quite early and always believed (absurdly incorrect with 20/20 hindsight) that the price ought to correlate to the "actual" utility of bitcoins, i.e how many transactions were performed to purchase goods and services. I imagined a future where bitcoins would be used for micro transactions online, illegal purchases (drugs/˜Wikileaks/banned stuff in dictatorships) and by people in hyper inflationary economies. I speculated that if the price would reach multiple thousands of USD per BTC, we would have seen massive adoption for even mainstream uses.
It's so strange, because I love the ideology behind it and the decentralised technology, and by many measurements bitcoin and other crypto initiatives would be considered a somewhat success if we didn't have the price to look at. That I can pseudo anonymously (or completely anonymous with stuff like zCash/Monero) transfer a token of wealth over the internet without a central party is so cool.
But I'm afraid that almost all of the price increase is simply a hype/speculation/hold-cycle that inevitable never will survive.
I used to dismiss this view, because it seems so impropable that an arbitrary digital asset would be able to fill a role like gold. But it does seem to be happening, and I am coming around to the idea. What is gold after all but a commonly agreed upon medium of value transfer, suitable because of scarcity and divisability, but other than that rather arbitrary too. If enough people decide that bitcoin is a good medium, then so it will be, and that momentum itself will keep it that way. And bitcoin does have a lot of attributes that make it suitable.
There is a lot of money looking for a place to go and be safe (from loss and inflation). There are very few 'pure' ways to simply store that value, even gold is difficult to invest in, at least if you want actual ownership and not merely a promissory note. Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) could be one of these ways.
I have a hard time understanding digital scarcity. Bitcoins are scarce with respect to "the" Bitcoin network, but there's nothing preventing someone from forking or starting their own clone of the entire system. While that new chain would be missing all the historic transactions of the original, is that meaningful in any important way with respect to scarcity?
The number of cells in an Excel spreadsheet are also finite, but we don't tend to impart value on them. And it's trivial to create a new spreadsheet with a whole new set of cells. What am I missing?
Bitcoin code has been forked thousands of times. Only a few forks survive today, and those are worth a small fraction of the original.
That's because Bitcoin, like all money, is a social construct. It's an idea and belief shared among many people. Bitcoin, like all money, has no intrinsic value, but derives value from the network of people who find it useful.
It's much more difficult to fork a network of people and shared beliefs than it is to fork the code.
And I'll preempt the inevitable argument that dollars and renminbi are backed by the military, or by taxes, or by central banks, etc. That's all hogwash. Money isn't backed by anything other than shared belief and the promises we make to each other.
The perceived value of gold as a store of value comes in part from the fact that humans have been using it as a means of trade/store of value across a vast span of cultures for many millenia. Bitcoin has been around for 8 years. With Bitcoin there is no guarantee that competing technologies won't spring up to replace it in the mid- to long-term. Gold will always be gold.
Also, gold is shiny. Personally, I'd much rather have a gold bar in my safe, that I could take out and hold in my hands, than a memory stick with some Bitcoin on it.
This is a weakly held belief but I feel it’s risky to buy gold for long term holding because asteroid mining will render it cheap and abundant in my lifetime. :)
It's like saying soon the gold will worth nothing because my alchemical guy will finally make the philosopher's stone. Asteroid mining will have a cost and therefore not will be render it totally cheap… or green. Bitcoin is neither green or worth anything, it's just in the head of people.
I think it's energetically cheaper to extract it from the sea than from anywhere in space. At current prices even if the moon was pure gold I don't think it could be economic to recover.
Reminds me of the snide economic distinction about gold. Unless you are doing work with gold as a raw material it isn't an investment but speculation. Even investing five hundred dollars for a day into Walmart is more investment as it enables short term production and utility creation of some sort - even if it is just getting a bag of potato chips at 3am. Gold or bitcoin in this case just sits there.
>But I'm afraid that almost all of the price increase is simply a hype/speculation/hold-cycle that inevitable never will survive.
People do get very fixated on the price. Anyone who bought into bitcoin at 16k or whatever is probably screwed at this point. If I were to guess on a long term settling price for bitcoin, I would place it somewhere between $400 and $4000 against the value of todays dollar.
Interestingly, it doesn't really impact me at all. I have a modest mining rig that brings in about $30 a month in random altcoins that I swap to either bitcoin or litecoin depending on where transaction fees are at. I then use that to buy stuff off aliexpress. That $30 is going out at about the same speed it's coming in so it doesn't really matter to me what the current price is. If the price goes up, more miners join and I get numerically less crypto but about the same value, and it goes the other direction if the price goes down.
It's not arbitrary but nor is it very scientific. It's an informed guess from an interested punter.
The last time I heard figures, it cost around $3300 in electricity for a given mining farm to mine a bitcoin on average.
That cost will go up and down based on the number of people mining but in my observation the cost of mining is usually pretty close to the value of a bitcoin. I can't prove that that isn't coincidence, but to me it makes sense. If the value of bitcoins goes up, people will online mining farms as it becomes profitable in areas with more expensive electricity, and the difficulty will go up. If the price drops, people offline their mining farms.
On the other hand, the approximate cost of mining a bitcoin is public knowledge since the current block difficulty is public knowledge. Anyone buying large amounts of bitcoin can make very accurate estimates of a miners profit margins with nothing more than the miners IP address and the block difficulty, which puts miners on the back foot for negotiation.
When it comes to the profit margin of miners, one component is the electricity price, but the other is amortizing the cost of the mining hardware. Graphics cards are relatively cheap ($200-800 depending), but ASICs can go for upwards of $12000-$15000. As the number of mining farms goes up, the pressure on mining hardware manufacturers to maintain a steady supply of mining hardware increases. If they cannot do so, the cost of replacement mining hardware increases and starts to eat into profits. If the supply gets too short, the cost of replacing the hardware can become so high that the real profit post-amortization is flagrantly not worth the effort, particularly in places with expensive electricity. Miners who are in it for the money usually want to see their profit completely amortize the cost of their hardware within three months of buying it. If it takes longer than that, you're straight up gambling that the current price won't drop before you can make a profit. GPU miners also often replace their cards on a 3 month cycle and sell the second hand ones on for gamers to use, which helps with the amortization situation.
My spitball estimate is that if ASICs remain dominant, $4000/BTC is the equilibrium point of it being profitable in some places but not others and the number of miners balancing the supply and cost of ASICs such that ASICs can be replaced at a steady rate without supply problems and still pay for themselves before they burn out or become obsolete due to a new generation of ASICs being developed.
$400 is the same spitball estimate, but assuming that ASICs fall out of favor, the difficulty drops, and all those etherium GPU rigs start moonlighting with bitcoin on the side.
Assets being priced proportionally to their currently-generated use-value isn’t how efficient markets work even in principle. If that were so, you could make predictable profits just by buying anything whose current adoption was currently on a predictable upward trend. An asset’s present price is first and foremost an estimate of its future price. As Andrew Critch put it, the reason the stock market is hard to predict is that it’s a prediction.
Why would someone even say something like this? There are multiple models of how pricing works. Models at their core are incorrect because they simplify a complex thing to something that can be used for predictions. They are good models when they help your predict correctly and they are bad models if they can't help you make predictions. But all are "wrong" on purpose.
Therefore there must be different models because people want to predict different things. And of course neither of them is how things really work.
"this is not how X works" doesn't need to be said, because yes that's the idea of using models. Otherwise you wouldn't use models.
"this is not how it works in principle" assumes that there is no model that would claim previously said statement. And since you can create unlimited amounts of models of course you can very often construct a model where the statement works.
I suggest instead of claiming such a thing it might be more interesting to think about how such a model would help more or less to predict things.
PS: I believe The Intelligent Investor or how that book was called and a social model called Communism are both promoting models that connect use-value to price-value. So it's not even far fetched. It's a very common thesis for discussing pricing of investments.
People in early spaces dream about mainstream use cases (kill credit cards, fix online payments), but killer early use cases are often randomly found. They're the ones most poorly served by the current market.
You need the extreme use cases like reducing the risk of hyper inflation early on, when the product is so raw, much like you might have with the first PC:
> [In the early PC days], Steve Jobs initially pitched the personal computer as a way to store recipes. It took years for the first killer use case, spreadsheets in the guise of VisiCalc, to appear.
The obvious difference with Jobs' pitch or the breezy nineties hype about the world wide web ("information superhighway" was essentially: "a really big, fast library") is that they undersold the potential, even on the hardware of the time. VisiCalc launched the year after Sequoia invested in Apple...
By contrast, we've been assured that blockchain is going to fix transactions, financial asset storage, security, contract law, corporate governance, fundraising, logistics, bad government and hyperinflations that haven't actually happened and what we've actually got to show for the last decade is speculative assets some people use to make money off other speculators via means which sometimes look suspiciously like hyperinflation and a much smaller number of people to circumvent money transmission laws. (And the problem certainly isn't that we haven't got the hardware to support it or any means for blockchain enthusiasts to connect with other blockchain enthusiasts)
I spend so much of my time on media literacy issues, and one thing I'd be careful of: most of these prognostications you cite should really be considered marketing. They are not thoughtful views of cryptocurrency.
If you're a software developer, I'd really dismiss lots of what you read about new technology, whether it be crypto or MongoDB. Here's my media literacy guide for software engineers:
(It's kinda fun to realize that by getting excited about cryptocurrency, I also got excited about the financial incentives behind the media ecosystem)
Also, be careful about throwing the baby (unfounded hype and speculation and charlatanism) with the bathwater (programmable money, open financial systems, digital scarcity).
This reasoning is repeated for every new technology.
"People are using [new thing] for [dangerous, speculative, immoral, hyped, trivial] purposes. Therefore [new thing] [will fail, will ruin civilization, should be banned]."
I've witnessed this way of thinking with laser discs, VHS tapes, personal computers, modems and BBSs, fidonet email, Usenet, Compuserve and AOL, graphical web browsers, mobile phones, the internet, online shopping, video games, strong encryption, Google search, Facebook, ephemeral messaging, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, IoT and bioengineering.
Maybe there were similar arguments about movable type, radio and television, I don't know.
I used to be a Cassandra about new things but I've learned from my mistakes to ask different questions now.
"If I ignore the [dangerous, immoral] uses of [new thing] is there still something worthwhile about it?"
"How might the [hyped, trivial] uses of [new thing] change how we live and become important in the future?"
The bathwater is not that great AFAICT. Scarcity in and of itself isn't that great. I mean technically, sure, blockchains are an interesting if wasteful method of ensuring scarcity and consensus on a public network. But that doesn't mean the end result is all that interesting.
Most of the other 'features' of blockchains are a negative - immutability/irreversibility, for example, or just a step backward in the capabilities provided by the mainstream systems.
> extreme use cases like reducing the risk of hyper inflation
The thing is, you can't test this unless and until you experience hyperinflation of "hard currencies" while at the same time Bitcoin price remains comparatively stable for use in actual transactions. Neither of those conditions has appeared. There is no sign of hyperinflation in the west. Even the turmoil of Brexit pushing the GBP/EUR rate from ~1.4 to ~1.1 over two years made no significant ground-level difference to consumer prices or wages in the UK.
Until then, it's a good way to sell tiger-repelling rocks.
Not all speculative bubbles follow the same schedule. The 2000s housing bubble in the US, for example, took years to play out. Just because tulips played out quickly does not mean BitCoin is not a speculative bubble.
I think what GP's trying to say is maybe it's time to retire the tulip analogy, and per your own point, maybe it's time to start referring to the Bitcoin bubble in terms of the housing market bubble instead?
I suspect a headline like "are bitcoins like the US housing market" probably wouldn't go down well though.
This comes down to deciding whether mentioning "Tulips" is a memorable shorthand for discussing all kinds of bubbles, or if we are attempting to use tulips as a model that we can reason from ("If it's like tulips, then since tulips X, we can expect Bitcoin to also X").
Personally, I take all mentions of Tulip Mania as a kind of memorable shorthand for "Hyper-speculative, with little or no trading on the basis of the underlying utility."
Why Tulips instead of houses? Because we as a society have been using the tulip analogy longer, that's really the only reason. It's not an assertion that tulips fit better than houses.
It's much the same as expressions like "Grandfathered in." Nobody worries about whether a particular law or regulation is actually being enacted as a way to deprive ex-slaves of their right to vote while guaranteeing it for illiterate whites. To almost everybody, it's just a phrase.
I think tulips make a nicer analogy, but to be fair it isn't exactly the same. Same goes with houses. Tulips and houses both have some intrinsic value. The closest equivalent aspect of BitCoin is what, goodwill?
In most desirable-to-live places, prices have recovered and gone above and beyond 2008 levels. Of course it's really the value of land and not the structure itself, but still, the scarcity aspect remains unchanged.
I was in YC during the same time as Coinbase (where I now work), and personally, I think cryptocurrencies are transformational. Having grown up during the Internet era and hearing from my parents about the Mainframe -> PC era, use cases and viable businesses take time. Even founders in early, disruptive spaces have a hard time figuring out the use cases.
Here's my own thoughts on why rational people — and media — get disruptive markets (like crypto) wrong:
> As someone who had worked in banking and and microfinance, I got excited about the idea of credible digital scarcity, programmable money, and open financial systems. I didn’t quite know the use cases that would follow, but it was clear to me that the world would never be the same.
> Mostly though, everyone I respected thought cryptocurrencies were stupid. One MBA classmate haughtily wrote off cryptocurrencies as only useful for drugs and pornography. My old management consulting friends—all from elite American universities—pooh poohed Bitcoin and other open cryptocurrencies as they fixated on the needs of their lucrative banking clients. The vast majority of successful, rational people disdained everything about cryptocurrency.
Adoption, per the article, seems to be the key driver for cryptocurrency in the long term. Right now it's hard to take cryptocurrencies seriously when its a wildly speculative commodity-like instrument of wealth. When cryptocurrencies are adopted in the commerce marketplace then we'll see its effectiveness.
Do those in the cryptocurrency space see this a viable instrument for commerce or are they just happy to trade it like a commodity?
Of course stablecoins are useful - they are basically "dollars" without any additional regulations tied to real dollars, or at least have orders of magnitude less regulations. I.e. they allow for much more unregulated activities because "it's only tokens, not a money". And of course people will create more and more stablecoins because customers will exchange fiat money for random strings of digits.
Crypto is the gold standard of payment methods in several spaces already, I really don't see why it can't expand to more other than ease of use reasons.
Imo it has to be a viable instrument for commerce, that is the core value that drives the speculation, even if 95% of the price is a result of speculation.
Columbus deserved to be laughed at. People of the time period knew how big the Earth was, and they knew that he would never make it to India like he wanted to do, and they were right. Columbus got lucky that there was a giant unknown land mass there (which he incorrectly thought was India) because if there hadn't been he would have starved to death.
Badly mis-characterizes "the Internet", annoyingly common mistake that to me says I should ignore any further speculation because if you don't understand the present you've a worse than pure luck chance to correctly predict the future.
The Internet is the completion of (the latest and vitally important phase of) the Network. The Network is like the Word, that's how big a deal it is.
Brief pause for definitions: The Word is the idea that makes language possible. Units of meaning that can be transmitted by one person and then received by other people, a revolutionary idea that by definition is prehistoric (history itself is an Application of the Word). The Network is a way for people to send and receive information over a distance, it works very well with the Word, and it's hard to imagine the Network without the Word, but it would actually stand on its own: sharing video of a cat studiously choosing a very expensive fragile object to knock off a narrow shelf works fine without the Word if you want a very concrete example from your modern experience. In our world that video would have a title, and thus need the Word, but truth be told the video stands on its own if you haven't invented the Word.
Note that the Word is not just the written word, writing is a (big) incremental improvement in the Word idea, but speech was already a big deal. Likewise the Network is not just the Internet, the Internet is a (big) incremental improvement in the Network idea, but telephony, newspapers and even travelling minstrels are already a big deal.
Anyway, scarcely anything is going to be as big a deal as even these incremental improvements to fundamentals like the Word or Network. You might think Money is a big idea, but that's _peanuts_ to the Word or the Network. If Bitcoin completely revolutionised Money (as if) that still wouldn't be anywhere near the difference the Internet makes.
So, Bitcoins are more like tulip mania because almost _everything_ is more like tulip mania. YA Fantasy novels, slogan T-shirts, pizza, marriage, any of these things is more like tulip mania than like the Internet.
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