Forum. Economists call “speculative bubble” phenomenon, alas too frequent, which sees the price of an asset, real or financial, soar well above its fundamental value. History is full of such episodes, more or less picturesque, as the bubble of tulips in the netherlands in the Seventeenth century or, more recently, the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the beginning of the century in the United States, which resulted in the famous sub-prime crisis in 2008-2009. Speculative bubbles always end up bursting, that is to say that the price of the assets involved, eventually collapses suddenly, resulting in its fall all those who have not jumped on time.
But the characterization of a bubble is often questionable, because it is very difficult to assess the fundamental value of an asset. Thus, the fundamental value of a share is defined as the present value of all future dividends that will pay the company that issued the action. But most often, no one has the slightest idea of the amount of future dividends, or even of the life of the company in question. In most cases, you can really recognize a bubble when it is too late, that is to say, when she broke out.
A case of school
The bitcoin, in contrast, is a textbook case of speculative bubble, as its fundamental value is clearly zero : never the holder of a bitcoin will only receive the lesser coupon or dividend. Its only purpose is to serve as a means of payment for a certain type of transactions, sometimes in the margin of the legality. Bitcoin, as his clone ether (managed by the platform Ethereum) is a cryptomonnaie, that is to say, a currency that is not controlled or guaranteed by a government.
It fascinates for a number of reasons : the conditions in which it has emerged and developed (nobody knows his mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto),…
