In October 2017, Bitcoin rose to $19,376 before plunging to $3200 by December 2018 and trading below $5300 to March 2020.  Then, pandemic lockdowns, government subsidies and payment deferrals enabled financial speculation as an international obsession.

As shown below, the price of Bitcoin exploded to $67,000 by last November as a world of cling-on companies, copy coins, and ‘meme’ bets came along for the ride.  Unsurprisingly, they’ve been crashing together since. So far, Bitcoin has fallen 56%, while many other tokens have lost more and gone to zero.

Many people who could not afford to gamble piled in for the slaughter as prices went skyward; some borrowed to buy.  This was horrible to watch, as usual. Worse was seeing so-called investment gurus encouraging and leading financial suicide with statements like this one from Real Vision’s Raoul Pal in November 2021:

“I started a buying a bunch of other coins, tokens, stuff that I really didn’t know a lot about. So, I just took a small weighting, like 20% of my portfolio, which is now 100% crypto, and has been for quite a while now, since maybe May of last year. So, I bought a basket saying, ‘I’m an idiot, I don’t really understand any of this stuff, but I want to see how it trades.’”

The 60-something ‘expert’ claims that he started the Real Vision platform to democratize finance and enlighten ‘do-it-yourself’ investors, and then broadcast as prices peaked that he had put 100% of his savings into crypto assets to “see how it trades.” A 22-year-old classmate of my son lost $80,000 in Luna.

Complete madness and zero accountability because people like Pal and other influencers make their revenue promoting ‘investment’ products and ideas, not risk management.

Financial-tainment has made the world even more dangerous for the gullible.