People won't panic, bitcoins at under 10k feels like a steal and it's hard not to buy.
This has happened before. And remember etherium's "omg end of world crash price" is still like 5000% higher than its price a year ago
And I bet you have thrown more of your money into it, again. That's the trap that gets most tulip traders. A few will make it out big, most lose. Keep in mind that there cryptofrauds are
closed systems, moneywise: for every dollar actually paid for it by the buyer (put into the system, if you will), a seller is getting a dollar "out of the system" simultaneously. The net result must always be zero.
The buying and selling of an actual good also moves money around, but the fact that the good is eventually consumed make it different: the producers only sell, the traders buy lower and sell higher, the consumers buy and consume (do not sell). There is a real "money transfer" from consumers to traders and producers that is sustained by the transfer of goods and that is acknowledged as a feature of this system by every participant: producers and traders are expected to win money, consumers to spend.
Cryptotoys and other speculative assets are not consumed, only traded. In bitcoin's case there is an interesting twist in that there are producers ("miners").
But there are no consumers, cryptotoys does got get consumed, only passed around (and sometimes lost).
Yet no one expects to lose money on this system. And people
expect to win money from it. Obviously, for some to pocket real money, others must lose real money. Even if the value of the particular cryptotoy would have to keep rising to infinity with more and more people "buying into it", there would still have to be people selling and walking out with the dollars. Either producers ("miners") or traders. The idea that everyone can win by jumping into the speculative bubble (any speculative bubble, mind you) is mathematically false. I do know this is basic stuff, but it's never too much to repeat it.
Only if the thing being speculated on has some use can people at least avoid being badly burned, for in the end they can still have something to show for it. Land speculation may make sense because land is useful and eventually gets, if not actually consumed, locked into use for a long time and taken off market (built on, etc). So the only justification for speculating on rising "value" of cryptotoys was that they would prove to be useful. As currency or whatever. But the opposite has been shown: whatever use they had as currency has been abandoned. The sole goal of people trading on it is selling it higher, taking real money out of the system. Obviously, they cannot ever take more than was put into it.
Funny how even the the physiocrats got the workings of the world more right than some modern peddlers of financial snake-oil... but they had their John Laws back then too.
