2013-03-18

On Bitcoin Bubbles

Why don't otherwise competent financial analysts chart Bitcoin compared to earlier vanguard infrastructure technologies like silicone chips, microcomputers, operating systems, email, mobile telephones, and social media?

Instead, they persist in describing it as a single stock or commodity caught in a speculative bubble.

While bursting bubbles certainly appear in the price charts of individual companies providing services using various components of global infrastructure, do such bursting bubbles really appear in the growth of infrastructure itself?

Doesn't quantum-leap evolutionary significance occasionally produce sustainable parabolic exceptions? Might not the 'nothing goes up forever' mantra have its own exceptions?

I honestly don't know the answer; I only mean to decry the lack of inquiry into this possibility by professional commentators who seem not to ask whether 'bitcoin', (judicious use of lower-case 'b'), might be less a brand name and more an underlying standard that is soon to embed into a number of fundamental human transaction types.

I suspect bubbles are more likely to burst in specific 'speculative' applications of bitcoin (sic) infrastructure, not in the underlying technology itself.

For that reason, while ordinary investors should certainly treat individual 'Bitcoin' ventures with the same caution they would any other start-up or penny-stock investment, they should take a stake in the legitimate underlying 'bitcoin' infrastructure.