Those poor millennials! Not only do they have to forgo home ownership in lieu of avocado toast, but their favorite anarchist’s asset class, cryptocurrencies, are down ~30% over the past week.
What on earth has caused this? Was it Jamie Dimon’s dad-like lecturing of “stupid traders” (including his own daughter!) inflating the cryptocurrency bubble? Was it rumors of the Chinese imposing yet another ban on Bitcoin, or ICOs, or issuing their own crypto-asset?
What’s the matter, Jamie?
So with that in perspective, let us ask an important question- why is Jamie so bent out of shape? Why does he care to comment about Bitcoin?
I mean, it isn’t exactly the first time the King of JPM has spoken out against decentralized money. He famously said “it’s a terrible store of value” in 2014.
The first possibility is that Jamie is right, crypto is akin to the Tulip Mania of the 1600’s and he is just trying to help these misguided millennials understand financial history. After all, something that rises 20x in a few years, and creates an orgy of copy cats (some which are more successful than others), can never be sustainable, right? There is, however, a small technical difference. As far as I know, it was not possible to instantly transfer a tulip between peers on a distributed network by leveraging readily available smartphones in a manner that no political or military authority could stop…
Which brings me to my next point — maybe Jamie is wrong. Or, better yet, maybe Jamie is scared of something he sees.
That second possibility is that crypto will eat finance over the next 10 years, just like software “ate everything” over the last 20 years. Which means that instead of the Tulip mania, maybe 2017 is akin to 1994. If this is the case, we may be on the cusp on an internet-bubble revolution that shakes “money” to its core, putting Jamie’s entire empire up for grabs.
So, which one is it? Is it Jamie right, or is it his millennial daughter (who sounds like a better trader than Dad) that sees the big picture?
Again, who knows… markets tend to decide these kinds of things over the long run. But, if this is a coin-flip, which outcome will really move the needle of human history?
