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Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $69,170 Tuesday morning, according to CoinMarketCap, breaching the previous all-time high of $68,990 in November 2021. The price then plummeted under $65,000 soon after reaching its peak.
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Ethereum, which currently sits at $3,815, has also been steadily climbing, though it still has a ways to go before reaching $4,721, the all-time high from November 2021.
Bitcoin and every other cryptocurrency rather famously nosedived in 2022, a year that opened with splashy Super Bowl ads featuring celebrities like Larry David and LeBron James. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of crypto exchange FTX was exposed as the emperor without clothes in 2022 and was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering in 2023. SBF is scheduled to be sentenced this month.
Bitcoin bottomed at around $16,500 in late 2022 since the last peak and cryptocurrencies more broadly saw people lose roughly $2 trillion. Obviously, no one knows for certain where the next peak will land, but the best time to buy may have been roughly six months ago. That’s when big players like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund got in, according to Reuters. The idea in investing is to buy low and sell high, and anyone getting in now due to FOMO—or fear of missing out—could be in for a rude shock if prices don’t climb considerably.
The crypto crash of 2022 caused some hard reassessments from tech reporters who were writing credulously about the world of Web3 and blockchains during the last crypto peak. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose and Platformer’s Casey Newton, for example, recently had a discussion on their podcast Hard Fork about how badly things went in 2022 when the “casino culture” of Bitcoin caused a lot of people to lose money.
“I feel burned by everything that I wrote about crypto,” Newton said last month.
But that hasn’t stopped many of the crypto hype-men from assuming their old positions now that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are once again ascendant in price. Hard Fork even had on Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who still believes in crypto and blockchain tech as optimistic and tangible versions of the future.
True believers will point to this new all-time high as proof that Bitcoin is good and blockchains are useful, even though we haven’t seen a convincing use case for the tech beyond money laundering. But take any advice on crypto with a grain of salt, including from us. There are some things that have definitely changed since 2022, including the introduction of spot bitcoin ETFs, which allow institutional money to more easily find its way into crypto.
Just make sure you only buy crypto with money you can afford to lose. Investing in crypto is fun precisely because it’s extremely volatile. And while Bitcoin’s price can go up very, very quickly, it can crash just as fast.