Crypto Bust Debunked Apr 2018

Released: 9th April 2018

In December 2017, I bought [INVALID FORM VAR]38,000 AUD.  Impressive mouth watering growth.  You can guess my exuberance when I saw the big gains in my crypto wallet.  Should I sell?  No. My game was to buy and hold for a year as I wanted to see and learn how the space works.

During that time, media article after another made predictions of rapid growth for 2018.  Not so yet. Bitcoin has been pummelled falling a whopping 60% since it peaked at [INVALID FORM VAR]12,000 AUD.  All in one month.

So what triggered the fall?  The simple answer is that reality kicked in.  Cryptos are not immune to the risks that most think they are.  Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  The networks that wrap around the crypto blockchain technology are not immune from disasters.  Governments and banks have been quietly watching and taking note.

Whilst the bitcoin blockchain was receiving a hammering as the world jumped on board in December, the distributed ledger held up.  Just.  The 10 minute block delay caused tremendous congestion whilst punters flocked into the game.  Just transferring bitcoin between wallets took 3 days to process for me.

There are two things that kill confidence in financial transactions than anything else.  The first is knowing your money is real and the second is knowing you can get it when you want to cash out.  Both of these points failed when hackers broke into a Japanese crypto exchange and ran off with [INVALID FORM VAR]50k bar of gold and you want a safety deposit box, you will scrutinise their service, check the quality of their keys, make sure their safe really exists in the basement and that security guards are monitoring 24/7.  We do no such thing with crypto exchanges.  The lure of massive returns has us forget to do the due diligence necessary to keep our money safe.

Therefore, whilst the design of the block chain software remains decentralised and tamper proof, exchanges and dealers take on the central role of being the trusted authority.  
These companies reveal very little about their technologies and how they protect their customers.  Governments and Banks are waking up to this.  The [INVALID FORM VAR]