Why oh why didn’t I buy more Bitcoin?

Every time I write about Bitcoin you can probably take it as a major sell signal. The last time I did so was in January 2014, at which point Bitcoin was trading around the $935 mark. Had you been inspired by my golden words and invested immediately in BTC (as we aficionados call it), here’s what would have happened: within a few months their value would have more than halved. ‘Bloody hell!’ you might have said. ‘This is an idiot’s game. Clearly there is no future in this stupid crypto-currency malarkey.’

But investment’s all about timing, isn’t it? Had you hung on a bit, watched it drift to its 2015 lows of around $216 dollars and at that point splurged your pension savings on, say, 200, you would now be a millionaire. I shan’t try to quote the current price. Perhaps, as you read this, it will have soared above last week’s record high of $7,879. Perhaps it will have continued the subsequent correction when its value fell by nearly 25 per cent in a day. What’s certain is that if you want to make or lose money very quickly, there’s nowhere more exciting than the ludicrously volatile cryptocurrency market.

‘Bitcoin is the greatest money-making opportunity any of us will ever see in our lifetime,’ says Dominic Frisby, author of Bitcoin: The Future of Money. Given that it was published in November 2014, you might imagine he’d got in early and become enormously rich by now. But no, poor Frisby had his stash nicked from his online wallet (one of the hazards of currencies which exist only in the electronic ether) and so decided that his other hobbyhorse, gold, was probably a better investment. It wasn’t — one reason being that the newer generation of investors are shunning the yellow metal for crypto.