In my cynical mind this just reads 'It sure is a slow news day, but we need to put something out. I know! the old trusty Bitcoin is crashing... or something!' Is there some other event that precipitated this that I missed?
It was $19000 last year and ~ $6200 today, doesn't that give you any pause?
"Wednesday’s losses were led by Ether, the second-largest virtual currency. It fell 6 percent to $171.15 at 7:50 a.m. in New York, extending this month’s retreat to 40 percent. Bitcoin was little changed, while the MVIS CryptoCompare index fell 3.8 percent."
They have hype in common, that's all.
Worse for those that have invested in crypto it means, not most people
I've been keeping an eye on bitcoin long before the bitcoin faucet dried up, and am a big believer in bitcoin as a practical currency rather than something to gamble with. Hopefully with this, bitcoin becomes usable again as means to transact in low-value trades with other people.
My biggest issue with the article: You cannot just compare 2008's route of one stock index with some arbitrary Crypto-Index. It's an unfair comparison.
I've did this just weeks ago myself: 2008's loss in S&P500 market-cap vs. this years loss in market-cap of the 5 leading crypto-curriencies. Which was about a third (Yes, it is just an approximation - it lacks the 2008's loss of market-cap in assets around the world, but so does it exclude ICOs and crypto-derivatives).
What makes such a comparison interesting though: The crypto-route was huge nonetheless, but it was more or less isolated. Which maybe was a good thing. If we were to believe in cyclical markets, with bubble-bursts being a recurring integral part, then maybe crypto was a "booby-trap" for spoofing speculation into it and save the rest of the financial markets this time?
