Amy Castor: BTC speculation is like musical chairs—with not many places to sit when the music stops

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Experienced cryptocurrency journalist and self-confessed Bitcoin sceptic, Amy Castor puts matters into perspective when it comes to the valuation of BTC. The spike in price in recent months has everyone, both crypto and non-crypto people, buzzing. “There’s a big rush of people trying to make money in the space,” Amy says. “People are kind of running in, in the hopes that it’ll go up higher.”

The price of BTC of late is around US$60,000, a whopping increase from its previous US$10,000 back in September. But Amy says BTC has no intrinsic value. She views it mainly as a speculative investment and predicts a repeat of what happened during the 2017 digital currency price crash: “This is a bubble, the bubble is going to pop,” she says. “It’s like a game of musical chairs. And there aren’t going to be a lot of places to sit when the music stops.”

In this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Amy tells Charles Miller that she was a marketing writer who eventually took the initiative to learn about digital currency before pivoting into her current profession. Being within cycling distance of lectures at MIT helped: “Sometimes Gary Gensler would teach courses at MIT Sloan and I would just go in and sit in the classes, and the other things that they had going on there as a way to get up to speed.”

Today, Amy’s numerous articles on digital currencies and blockchain technologies can be seen on The Block, Bitcoin Magazine, Coindesk, Forbes and Decrypt—all of which gave her exposure, but to her, writing on her blog has proven to be a better fit.

“There was a time when I was writing for different crypto publications and at some point I just sort of gave up on that and just said, I’m just going to write what I want to write for my blog. It seems like when I was just mostly true to myself is when my stories would get the most attention.”

Amy is as doubtful about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as she is about the price of BTC. She admits NFTs have brought excitement to digital currency in recent months, noting that more and more people are reading about them and buying digital currency to be able to join the NFT bandwagon. However, she sees no real value in NFTs themselves. As she points out, “You could have an entity that points to nothing.”

It’s unclear whether NFTs will remain relevant for long. She believes they will eventually hit a stumbling block. “I think the problem with it is they’re going to run up against certain regulations.”

Amy looks to some NFT purchases as contentious. For instance, the electronic mosaic by artist Beeple that sold for US$69 million. Amy was quick to suggest that it’s digital currency insiders who buy these types of NFTs and don’t seem to care about the artwork itself.

Also known for her extensive research and articles on Tether, Amy didn’t shy away from disclosing her doubts on the so called stablecoin: “What is backing Tether in terms of actual dollars?”

As to the future of digital currency and where it’s heading, Amy says “regulations will eventually catch up to everything that’s going on at the moment.” She believes Bitcoin will still be around, but it won’t have much value.

Hear the whole of Amy Castor’s interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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