Forking hell, crypto is collapsing!

For those of you needing a distraction from the pervasive Brexit omnishambles (link NSFW unless your workplace is fun/sweary), we bring you the Great Crypto Crash of November 2018.

Here's a one-month view of the king of crypto, bitcoin, which at pixel was down almost 13 per cent over the last 24 hours. Having managed to stay above $6,000 for the whole of 2018 (albeit down from around $20,000 last December), it has now broken through that level and is trading at its lowest in more than a year, at around $5,500 (screenshot from industry news site Coindesk):

Fundamentals don't really exist in crypto markets, but people on the internet seemed to think the collapse in the last 24 hours was related to the fact that bitcoin cash — a kind of clone that was “forked” from the original last year when developers couldn't agree on how to allow for more bitcoin transactions — was . . . forking off again.

Remember when people told you bitcoin had finally stabilised? Us too. There was this, for example, sent to us on Tuesday from retail currency brokers FxPro (emphases ours):

Major cryptocurrencies lost about a per cent at the start of the new week, but they are in general demonstrating enviable stability . . .
Now, the stable market contributes to the spread of Bitcoin as a means of payment. This is similar to the unhurried construction of a reliable foundation which is capable of withstanding new storms.

Sorry, but HAHAHAHA.

Then there's the thinking bro's crypto, ether (which powers Ethereum):

Back in the day (a few months ago) the only thing not showing red on crypto price site CoinMarketCap would have been “stablecoin” Tether. But inhabitants of the Brodom of Cryptoland seem to finally have come to end of their, yes, tether with the company's claims to be solvent, so the supposed digital dollar has been breaking the buck since the start of October. It was down about half a per cent on Thursday, at just over 98 cents.

In the top 50 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap, just one was showing any kind of stability: USD Coin, a dollar-based coin issued by Goldman Sachs-backed crypto wallet company Circle and the centralised overlords of the decentralised future, Coinbase. Stability in the sense that traders were so desperate to get out of their positions in free-floating cryptos that they were willing to pay a 2 per cent premium for the luxury of holding something they can redeem for dollar. (It was trading around $1.02 — a bit like a bond yielding minus 200 basis points.)

Fiat on the internet! It's the future.

We'll leave you with the words of Professor Nouriel Roubini, because nobody does doom better than he does:

I could gloat about Bitcoin collapsing 10% in a day to $5700. But that is still some way to ZERO where Bitcoin belongs. Actually since Bitcoin is The Mother of All Toxic Pollutions & Environmental Disasters its true fair value is highly NEGATIVE with the right externality tax
— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) November 14, 2018