Shutterstock
There was once a time when the only segment of the population that cared about Bitcoin was tech-savvy people looking to buy drugs on the dark web, but that’s changed dramatically over the past year or so as the cryptocurrency has skyrocketed in value— making the Winklevoss twins billionaires in the process. They’re far from the only people who have benefited from investing early on, and plenty of others have recently jumped on the bandwagon as the price continues to rise.
There are some analysts who believe the potential value of Bitcoin is essentially limitless, while others are slightly less optimistic. In my experience, there’s no better way to get your Twitter mentions flooded with angry comments from random people by suggesting the Bitcoin surge might be a bubble, and as the price continues to increase, you might start to wonder how your own investments would be impacted if (or— more likely— when) that bubble ends up bursting.
While Bitcoin might currently be the hottest thing in the economic streets, it’s still a relatively small player in terms of the global economy. Unless you’ve decided to liquidate all of your assets to invest in a cryptocurrency with no intrinsic value, this chart from Capital Economics shows just how little of a shit you should give if the Bitcoin bubble ends up bursting.
Capital Economics
Andrew Kenningham— the chief global economist at the company— told Business Insider why most normal people shouldn’t care less about what happens with Bitcoin:
“If the price of bitcoin fell to zero today, the paper losses would be equivalent to a 0.6% fall in US equity prices. As most investors have bought bitcoin at much lower prices, the relevant losses would arguably be smaller.”
I guess we can start to worry when a single bitcoin is worth $1 million and I have to talk myself out of jumping off of a bridge for not getting in on the ground floor, but until that happens, I’m not going to stress out too much.