Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

lads who got in very early on, have cleaned up, but they were Ponzi's after that, most lost their balls, the end!

yup, i have met one or two of these lads, and i suspect this is their now situation, they had completely convinced themselves of this easy wealth creator, but were unable to see the woods!

yea its unfortunate alright, hopefully some did get out in time, and were investing in other asset classes all along, but i have met some fully invested, so theyve probably lost most if not all, it cant be a good feeling, people are truly desperate out there, trying to get ahead, but theres very few easy wealth creators out there, unless you re born into it!

Bitcoin has further to fall and will at some stage probably be overtaken by a new wave of digital currencies. Many regulator statements indicate it is essentially a combination of money laundering and "get rich quick" schemes that have lead to it gaining notoriety, mainly because it is entirely unbacked by anything. Once the regulatory net inevitably gets thrown over it, the volatility and growth experienced in the past will no longer be possible. However, I'm sure the benefits of and lessons learned from bitcoin will ultimately still exist in the new wave of digital currencies.

Back in 2017, before it started to take off, it was worth around $20k at one stage but the vast majority of that year it actually traded below $10k. As someone posted above, I think it is not unreasonable to think something between $10-15k this year is somewhere it might find a bit more of an equilibrium in its price.

Right, so you have really no understanding of what trading is other than a very superficial tenuous connection to the industry, selling services.

I have no interest in Crypto other than a curiosity around the psychology of it all. I have been developing HFT trading algos in traditional financial markets for the last 15 years, so I actually understand how trading strategies make money, rather than say chatting to a guy in the canteen or something like that.

What I think you are referring to above in terms of guys coming back is that they may have gone off to trade their own account and then come back to the firm. A trader might have a strategy that works for a period of time, but every strategy has a decay built into it. This can be due to increased competition, changes in matching algorithms, reduced tick values, changes in market conditions (stability/volatility) etc etc. If you are trading on your own, it is difficult to continuously keep ahead. You need to trade the current market to make money and also spend time on strategy development so you have a continuous pipeline of new stuff. This is really challenging on your own, there really is a huge benefit to scale. So, you will often have a trader with a single strategy type that works for a while and then stops working and they don't have new ideas. Generally speaking, in most cases, strategies will be flat EOD, so they would be continuously making money on it for the time they are trading.

Only recently. Thanks for the info, bot.