The answer is “to zero”.
Over the past two weeks, investors have seen their bitcoins go up 10% in a day, down 10% in a day, down another 10% over 4 days, down 20% in a day, and down 15% in a day.
Having a bitcoin fork (Bitfinex) distributing its own fraud of a cryptocurrency shutting down isn’t helping matters any. There’s plenty of others out there which have no purpose in life to exist except to suck up cash in favour of their incumbent creators.
Stop to think what would happen if you had three-quarters of your networth (measured at the beginning of the year – after all, Bitcoin did go to USD$20,000 at one point) go through a string of days like the above.
I see a lot of obviously young and inexperienced investors in the reddit forums (e.g. /r/bitcoin) that have never been involved in anything resembling a bear market in their lives, and their mentality will be “buy the dips and hold on”. This is financially ruinous when holding an asset going to zero (see: Nortel investors). Another group will be “diversify into other cryptocurrencies”, but what good does diversification do when the entire asset class (if you want to call it an ‘asset class’) is garbage, just like the dot-com stocks in the late 1990’s? Is your bitcoin truly going to be one of the survivors like Amazon (which went down about 95% from peak-to-trough after the tech wreck) or is it going to more likely be like Alta-Vista, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, or a zombie like Yahoo that never was able to resume its glory days?
My only regret is that they haven’t opened options trading yet on Bitcoin, although the implied volatility on those puts would be extreme.