Is bitcoin the biggest financial bubble in history?

The cryptocurrency has crossed the threshold of $ 11,000. Several factors explain the rise of 1.000% that it has known since the beginning of the year. But the number of transactions and the number of holders of this currency remains low, which makes fear the bursting of a bubble.

On November 29, bitcoin crossed the symbolic threshold of $ 10,000, an increase of more than 1,000% since the beginning of the year. The cryptocurrency did not stay perched so high for a long time (it is worth $ 9,547 on November 30 at 1:00 pm) but such a rapid rise is unusual. In comparison, the Nasdaq took five years to climb by 700% between January 1995 and March 2000 just before the bursting of the internet bubble. In 1996, at the time of its IPO, Yahoo! had climbed 154%. Closer to home, in France, Plastivaloir saw an increase of 1.238% in five years, Xilam animation + 1.776% in three years and Catana group + 488% last year.

The case of bitcoin remains exceptional: it is neither a stock nor an index but a currency that is not regulated by any central bank. It's an algorithm. Today, the total capitalization of bitcoin is estimated by CoinMarketCap at $ 160 billion. The sum may seem important but the number of bitcoin transactions is still ridiculous: 11 million in the second quarter of 2017 while Visa achieved 42 billion in the same period. These transactions are not free: according to the Digiconomist which publishes a "Bitcoin energy consumption index", the cryptocurrency uses the equivalent of the electricity consumption of Morocco to carry out its operations and figures at 271 kWh the amount of electricity needed by each transaction, fifty times more than for Visa.

14 million portfolios worldwide

Yet bitcoin finally has a small number of users. A study published at the end of April 2017 by the Center for Alternative Finance of the Cambridge Business School's Judge Business School estimated that at the time there were only between 2,9 and 5 , 8 million active users of one or more cryptocurrencies.

Economist Patrick Artus recalls that bitcoin can rise indefinitely, as demand rises while supply is stable. In fact, the number of bitcoin is limited to 21 million (there are 16,709,550 today) and it is not theoretically possible to increase the money supply. The increase in demand leads to higher prices, but according to Patrick Artus, it is a speculative bubble that will end badly. For him, the explosion of the bitcoin bubble will have an impact on the economy because it will cause evaporation of wealth.

On the contrary, for Thomas Glucksmann, head of development for Asia-Pacific at Gatecoin, bitcoin is largely undervalued: "if we look at the long-term potential of technology in 10, 20 or 30 years, $ 10,000 c 'is cheap'. Same story at Christine Lagarde, director of the IMF, for whom bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have as much future as the Internet. Jean Tirole, Nobel Prize winner in economics, is not convinced: "it's something that has no intrinsic value that can collapse overnight".