Bitcoin won’t be rebounding after its year-long freefall, at least according to one of the popular cryptocurrency’s earliest millionaires.
Erik Finman, the young German crypto king who famously turned a 2011 investment of $1,000 into $4 million when Bitcoin hit an all-time high one year ago, says BTC is “dead.”
“Bitcoin is dead, it’s too fragmented, there’s tons of infighting, I just don’t think it will last,” Finman told MarketWatch. “It may have a bull market or two left in it, but long-term, it’s dead.”
Bitcoin peaked at $19,783.21 exactly one year ago today: December 17, 2017. That headline-grabbing landmark was followed by a dramatic 50 percent drop in January, which turned out to be the beginning of a 12-month trend characterized by small gains and huge losses.
One particularly brutal example came when Bitcoin shares shed $1,000 in value over a 24-hour period in early September, bringing other crypto like Litecoin down with it.
“Litecoin has been dead for a while,” Finman added. “It’s like when the sun is going down and there’s that eight minute period just before it goes dark. Litecoin is in its seventh minute.”
Time has further details on Bitcoin’s notable lows:
One unit of Bitcoin was worth less than $6,000 toward the end of June. Bitcoin’s value then collapsed further in late autumn — hitting around $5,000 in mid-November, all the way down below $3,500 in early December.
As of around 7 a.m. ET today, December 17, 2018, Bitcoin was worth about $3,250, according to CoinDesk. That’s a decrease of 84% compared to Bitcoin’s all-time high reached exactly one year ago.
In other words, if you invested $1,000 in Bitcoin a year ago, it would be worth only $160 right now.
As of December 17, Bitcoin was trading at $3,558.36 per coin and had hit a 24-hour low of $3,181.70 per coin, according to CoinDesk.
But Finman says the outlook is better for other project-based cryptocurrencies—he named Ether and ZCash as two potentially successful examples.
“I’m better at this kind of stuff than those [Wall Street] millionaires,” he said. “They don’t know how to work the system, they’re nerds. I’m more than that.”
If you take Finman’s outrageously decadent Instagram feed as a sign of wisdom, maybe it’s worth heeding his advice.