The new year began with a bang as the price of a single bitcoin rocketed up past $1,100 and quickly fell back to around $900, where it seems to be holding steady for now. With such dramatic price movement comes attention, especially from those who are excited about the investment possibilities for Bitcoin and similar decentralized blockchain-based assets.
The last time there was so much attention on the price, Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito made the case in Wired that focusing so much on this one fluctuating metric is a distraction:
Unlike the early Web, though, Bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. Every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or “irrational exuberance.” But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, “the price of domain names didn’t determine the usefulness of the Internet.”
With a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of Bitcoin in perspective. So don’t worry so much.
The case holds true even today and should be referred to for perspective every time there is a sudden burst in bitcoin price news.