Thursday marks the thirtieth anniversary of the infamous Black Monday on Wall Street, but for the crypto industry it’s “just Monday.”
Oct. 19, 1986 still strikes fear into the hearts of die-hard bankers as the date of the single biggest one-day stock market collapse in history.
‘Suffering’ 23 percent losses, legacy finance quickly understood what happens when automated trading goes wrong. For Bitcoin and altcoin markets, however, 23 percent is an almost daily occurrence for one investor or another.
As serial investor Alex Tapscott noted this week, any Monday could be a far worse Black Monday for Bitcoin, but the panic is comparatively negligible.
The multiple major crash episodes Bitcoin has experienced since 2013 have seen near 50 percent losses, while investors become more and more resilient, and rebounds more and more stable.
“The first lesson I learned was that these things happen,” one trader at the time, Nicholas Taleb, told Bloomberg in a commemorative article.
“The second lesson I learned was that when they happen, what you make everywhere else disappears. Unless you’re hedged for events like Black Monday, whatever alpha you think you’re going to get, you’re not going to get.”
While traders had seen “signs” prior to the crash, Bitcoin investors are still headstrong despite the multiple warnings from traditional finance that the cryptocurrency is in a bubble.
Opinions on the phenomenon are split down the middle, with steadfast advocacy facing off against those who deem Bitcoin more unreliable than Tulip Mania.