Whatever happened to bitcoin?
This is Money Podcast
This is Money
4.1 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2018
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whatever happened to bitcoin? After the mania at the end of last year when the price spiked to almost $20,000, the cryptocurrency took a tumble but more noticeably attention has drained away.
You need no greater sign of that than figures showing bitcoin Google searches are down 90 per cent.
That adds weight to the argument that much of the late 2017 big leg-up was driven by mainstream punters jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
So with bitcoin largely out of the headlines, is that it for the cryptocurrency or is it time to buy for the long-term when things are quiet.
On this week’s podcast we take a look at who’s buying, who’s holding and who might be waiting for the price to rise again and greater fool theory to deliver someone who will take their bitcoin off their hands.
Simon Lambert, Lee Boyce and Georgie Frost also take a look at gold – and why people aren’t buying this traditional form of investment portfolio insurance – and the most consistent investment trusts of the past decade.
And finally, the Government’s policy currently appears to be to confuse motorists as much as possible, with new MOT rules recently joining the car tax muddle. Are drivers now being held to ransom by mechanics over ‘dangerous’ faults – surely no garage would do that?
Enjoy.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to This Is Money podcast in partnership with NSN. I'm your host, Georgie Frost and alongside |
| 0:06.5 | editor Simon Lab and I today is Consumer Affairs editor Lee Boyce. And coming up, whatever happened to |
| 0:12.6 | the Bitcoin boom. After the astonishing rise at the end of last year, Bitcoin sunk, bounced |
| 0:18.0 | and then sunk again. Have we lost interest? Is this still the future? |
| 0:22.6 | And why aren't people searching for gold? Also today from investing to saving our Atombank riding to the rescue and a car owner is being ripped off by some garages, by changes to the MOT. |
| 0:35.6 | Don't forget you set up today with all the latest breaking money news, just go to this ismoney.co.uk or download the app. |
| 0:43.0 | This is Money, brought to you in partnership with NS and I, where safer savings set you free. |
| 0:50.0 | Now it wasn't long ago that Bitcoin seemed to be all anyone was talking about. |
| 0:54.6 | Cryptocurrencies we were told with the future. |
| 0:57.0 | Bitcoin was the trailblazer just six months ago, trading at more than $19,000 it was. |
| 1:03.9 | But fast forward to now, and it's down to around $7,500. |
| 1:09.2 | A sign, perhaps, of its volatile nature and we back up |
| 1:12.5 | there soon or have we had enough of Bitcoin and maybe cryptocurrencies in general. |
| 1:18.4 | A very warm welcome to you both. Lee firstly, what's Bitcoin? What's cryptocurrency? |
| 1:22.9 | So Bitcoin is sort of original cryptocurrency. It was created in 2009. A digital currency that you can use to buy and sell things online if, you know, website accept it. It only exists online to get a hold of Bitcoin. It must be mined by people that have computers that have the capabilities to do it and they solve complex mathematical |
| 1:44.3 | problems to get hold of the Bitcoin. Transactions are shared on a large public ledger called |
| 1:49.0 | the blockchain to ensure that there's full sort of integrity in the system. And that goes |
| 1:53.8 | with most cryptocurrencies, that's how they work, that's how they operate, there's loads |
| 1:57.5 | out there. And at the moment, what we're seeing is there's been |
| 2:01.2 | a real slowdown of interest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. You know, there was a sort |
| 2:06.3 | of time last year, I would say, as we ran up to sort of Christmas, where everyone from the man |
| 2:11.9 | in the pub to the man in a taxi to every single person that you possibly could ever think about |
... |
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