The price of bitcoin is hovering under $70,000 as of this afternoon. It’s recovered just a hair after
tanking last week, but still lost 40% of its value after peaking at $122,000 last fall.
It’s a similar story with other cryptocurrencies like Ether, and it has left investors asking why did this happen, and why now?
Susan Kamenar, in Denver, Colorado, said she got into cryptocurrency around 2018 for one main reason: FOMO. She doesn’t have her whole life savings in there, just an amount she was willing to gamble with. But even so, when the price dropped last week? “I definitely freaked out, had a little mini panic attack inside. I’d never seen it tank that fast and that dramatically before,” Kamenar said. But she isn’t ready to let the dream die quite yet.
“Ultimately, I was still in the green, so I decided to hold. It’s already plateaued and kind of bounced back to the 70-mark. This is not the dip to end all dips, there’s no way,” Kamenar said. Others are not so sure. Paul Krugman, an economics professor at City University of New York, said this could be what he calls “Crypto Fimbulwinter.”
“In Norse mythology, the Fimbulwinter is the three-year-long winter that precedes the end of days. So it’s kind of like the final winter,” he said. Krugman said bitcoin has had 17 years to prove itself, and maybe time is up.
“How often can you convince people that something is the currency of the future, where is the actual use?” he said. “It was supposed to be a safe haven, something that people would buy when deeply concerned. But we’re not seeing that, it’s behaving like a speculative tech stock.”
Some crypto optimists will give Krugman that.
“We saw a narrative basically fall apart; the narrative that bitcoin is a protection against inflation and government spending run amok, but actually with every business cycle we see that this was not true,” said Igor Pejic, a tech analyst and author of “
Tech Money.” When times are good, people pile into crypto. When times are panicky, people stampede out. | 
