The “little guys” are chasing after fortune by investing in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in strike-it-rich hopes that some economists liken to the speculative bubble of the dot-com craze, The Washington Post reported.
All it takes is a story like Jacob Melin — who in two years had a new house, a new truck, and a new consulting business, Crypto Consulting Group in Louisville, Ky., all by investing in bitcoin, the Post reported.
According to Melin, cryptocurrencies allow “for the masses to be venture capitalists” — and he’s got plenty of clients who agree.
“My thinking, everybody should be in this to some extent,” Melin told the Post. “You have it as an insurance against the traditional market.”
In one recent meeting with Melin, software salesman Cedric Knight told him: “Us little guys working our butts off, we can’t get ahead. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change my life,” the Post reported.
“[G]uys like me, I’m not in the loop,” Knight later told the news outlet. “This is my chance… I’m almost afraid not to take the chance.”
According to the Post, bitcoin has soared by more than 2,500 percent in value in the past two years, but it and other cryptocurrencies were never intended as a way to make money — rather as a technologically savvy way to buy and sell goods and services outside the normal system of cash and credit cards.
It soon became a fast way to riches, a hedge against anxiety about financial security and the economic future or both, the Post reported.
“I almost blame the older generation,” Melin told the Post. “I see these unsustainable programs. I’m going to be these people’s slaves for the rest of my life.”
For him, bitcoin, a currency backed by no government, was a way to shield himself from those risks; he started by buying five bitcoin, at $400 each, and then roughly two dozen more, as the price reached toward $1,000. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” Melin told the Post.
That would change: The price of a bitcoin in 2017 shot up to $2,000, and then $5,000, and then $10,000, and then, briefly, nearly $20,000.
In August, Melin joined a cryptocurrency consulting business, started by another early investor, Enrique Rodriquez, with the aim of guiding newcomers, the Post reported.
“People have this perception of bitcoin as fast money,” Melin said. “Because it was.”
But as bitcoin and its many competitors are hitting the mainstream, the once-lucrative market is turning into what may be the world’s most volatile — what some economists call a speculative bubble in line with the dot-com craze of the late 1990s, the Post reported.
Investors are bidding up prices of bitcoin and its many smaller competitors and selling in a panic. Values of cryptocurrencies rise and fall in a matter of hours, sometimes by more than 30 percent, the Post reported.
Knight thinks it’s worth the gamble.
“Bitcoin is my potential pension,” he told the Post.
“They tell you to go to college, get your education, then you’ll have a six-figure job,” he said. “I know so many people working at Starbucks with all this education. I was one of these people that was told, ‘Go into debt, and then pay us for the rest of your life.’ It’s a major concern. It’s a weight on me.”
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