Bitcoin reached approximately nineteen thousand dollars on December 17, 2017, a price that represented a roughly twenty-fold increase from the start of the year. The conversations happening around it by that point were more interesting than the price chart.
What the peak revealed most clearly was the gap between the people who understood what they were investing in and the people who did not, and the fact that both were making money for the time being. The ICO market had grown explosively alongside Bitcoin. Initial coin offerings allowed new cryptocurrency projects to raise money from the public by selling tokens. Many of these projects had whitepapers describing ambitious decentralised applications. Some had working prototypes. Many had neither, and were raising millions of dollars anyway, because the environment had become one where the word blockchain on a document was enough to attract capital.
The serious work being done on the underlying technology was real and continued through the noise. Ethereum, which had launched in 2015, was enabling programmable contracts and decentralised applications in ways that went beyond Bitcoin's original scope. The idea of cryptographic tokens representing real assets was being explored by legitimate financial institutions. The research community was working on scaling solutions for the fundamental throughput limitations of the major blockchains.
None of that serious work was what was dominating the headlines. What was dominating the headlines was the price, and the stories of people who had invested in 2015 and were now wealthy, and the questions people were asking about whether it was too late to get in.
It was not too late to get in, in the sense that the price continued rising for another few weeks. It was effectively too late in the sense that the correction was coming and would be severe. By December 2018, Bitcoin was trading below four thousand dollars.
The correction was painful for people who had bought near the top. It was clarifying for the technology. What remained after the bubble deflated was the actual work on actual applications, and a more honest conversation about which of those applications were genuinely served by a blockchain and which had added one for the attention it attracted.