Bitcoin pulled a swan dive from ~10K in the middle of Feb to bouncing under 5K now (on black Friday the 13th for God's sake.) Why? Because cash, which was trash, went to king with the coronavirus. Once the stock market started moving down, a cascade of margin calls drove all down to where FUD kicked in. Way out of the money stop loss orders pushed downward, and the entire cryptomarket sagged and caved in the same way, leading to defaults for stakers as well as speculators. And everyone wanted nothing that could not be spent on toilet paper and bread right NOW. The repo market locked up, everyone ran to the US dollar.
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Is this an over reaction? It doesn't matter, it happened. H1N1 killed 1,000 souls in the US before it was even declared a national emergency. Nothing of size was ever cancelled though ~20K died in the USA in 2009. Wuhan viruses have meant bad flu season for decades.
On the other hand, the possibility that this virus escaped from a lab is extra depressing. All of the debunking stories say "China would never pursue dual use biotechnology." "The lab would never leak," "we closed the lab in Canada where that Chinese researcher worked when we stopped doing dual use bioweapons there." Yeah, what else ? " The check is in the mail" " Cee U Next Tuesday. "I am not a crook." "I didn't know she was your sister." "I did not sell the used lab animals to the wet market."
We know China leaked SARS from a Beijing lab several times around 2004, killing a few. Maybe this one does turn out to the the Wuhan 400 virus Dean Koontz wrote about in 1981, just a special weaponized engineered gift from the Chinese party to the world. Given that it is the end of the world and we can never travel, go to eat or church or concert or a pub on Saint Patrick's day, hug your friends again, and the world economy has locked up worse than 9/11.
So, crypto? Bounced a tad better than a dead cat. If you look back just a year, the 2020 lows did not come close to the 2019 lows yet. Wheras a quick check of the Dow Jones above shows the Dow rattling down around the highwater mark of 2016.
It is still look out below territory right now. But clearly again Bitcoin passes a test of " if Bitcoin was gonna die it would have already died by now."
Weak hands lost a lot of bitcoin. Bitcoin not hitting 3,000USD was key. The long slow HODL is still good to go. Average cost, brothers. Because the "we are all Venezuela" money printing switch is on, around the world. The EU, Sterling, China, will all follow the USA in hanging paper the modern way, just flooding the world with mindless liquidity to try and help what's happening. If ever there was a testbed for Austrian econ for Bitcoin, here it comes. Life is gonna go on.
We love ya cryptofans !
