One of the biggest stories in popular culture in 2017 is the explosion of interest in Bitcoin. While many people are firm believers in its staying power (as well as cryptocurrencies in general), I lie in the camp that it’s also one of the world’s biggest financial bubbles ever. I think that long term, the blockchain concept could very well be here to stay, but in the short term the price of bitcoin and other crypto-currencies have far surpassed the intrinsic value that they represent as mediums of exchange.

As great as it is when a new technology promises to revolutionize an industry, when public excitement becomes too strong, prices can depart from the underlying value leading to a bubble. I hold the opinion that bubbles are generally harmful to society, regardless of the participant. The person who doesn’t partake in the bubble (understandly) feels regret for having missed out on riches. The person who does participate will on average enter too late and suddenly begins to spend significant time checking prices and becomes less productive during the day. Then there are those who are not savvy with investing and decide to make leveraged bets at exactly the wrong time (sometimes even funded by credit cards) and potentially ruin their financial futures when the bubble inevitably bursts. While the publicity generated by bubbles is positive and could ultimately lead to the adoption of valuable new technologies, they can be very harmful to a large number of people in the short term. My goal with this story is bring awareness to these realities.

In this dashboard, follow the story and I hope you’ll see where I’m coming from! Thanks for looking.

Technical Discussion

To be able to compare each financial bubble over a similar time period, I decided to add custom column to my SeriesData table which calculates the peak price for that series, and then the days before/after that peak price. I created a line chart with the x-axis representing days since the peak thus allowing all price charts to be overlayed.