If you’ve been following the news you’ll know, I’m sure, that Bitcoins have continued to rise in value; the “cryptocurrency” is booming at the moment. How much has it gone up? An unprecedented 1000% since the start of 2017.
A single one is now worth around $9000; that’s down from nearly $12,000 earlier in the week. It’s been a rollercoaster ride for Bitcoin “investors” and the market is going to continue edging upwards in real terms for a while to come.
The general trading price will certainly reach $12,000 and continue going upwards.
And then it’s going to come crashing down, spectacularly. There are numerous reasons why, including the fact that cryptocurrency is already being targeted for legislation and international monitoring … but there are others too. This is a bubble, and bubbles burst.
Let’s try to bear something in mind; a thing is only worth what people believe it’s worth.
Hang the Mona Lisa at an auction and people will wet their pants over it. It’ll go for many, many millions. Because the people at that kind of auction believe the Mona Lisa has intrinsic value which can be measured in its artistic merit and in an insurance estimate.
Take the same painting down to the local car-boot sale, call it a fake, and offer it in an auction of your own and see how many people want it to hang on their living room wall; it’ll sell, but forget using the money to fund your next holiday.
So what inflates a bubble? Perception.
Cryptocurrency is in vogue because it has a market value that, right now, people are willing to pay. That’s all it is. There’s no magic involved here. And the more people want to buy in, the higher that value goes. These kind of inflationary cycles can go for a long time, in a total inversion of sanity.
The first bubble was in tulip bulbs. It wiped out the fortunes of many prominent families in the Netherlands and elsewhere when it burst in February 1637. It made no sense at all, but at the time a single bulb was worth the value of an entire estate.
People believed in it for a while, and then they stopped believing. It’s just as simple as that. There are many different reasons why this happens, but the end result is always the same. Something that had been deemed to hold high value becomes worthless overnight.
Which brings me to the Aberdeen manager and what happened to him last night at Ibrox. A lot of people have invested a lot of time and effort and hope in this guy; surely that bubble has now burst. We’re past “peak Derek McInnes”; it’s downhill all the way from here.
This guy’s bubble has been ready to burst for ages. It was just a matter of time.
I knew it would happen watching them play Hearts on a Friday night, 8 April 2016, when they lost 2-1 in spite of having been in the lead. They could have closed the gap on us to a mere two points with a win that night, having played 33 games. We had a game in hand, and history will record that we won that game 2-1 the following day – at Fir Park ironically enough – but in the aftermath of the Hearts game McInnes conceded, although there were still games after the split.
I knew then that this guy was a busted flush. There was nothing to him. Aberdeen players sensed their manager’s defeatism that night; although Celtic promptly drew 1-1 at home with St Johnstone it couldn’t have mattered less; Aberdeen won one game of their last five and lost the other four, including a 3-2 match at Parkhead where we secured the title.
Don’t listen to the media pundits who claim Aberdeen could have taken our crown; that was never likely. But McInnes could have run us closer than he did. In the end, he feebly surrendered that night on national TV and it affected his team, and you could tell it had.
That day at Parkhead they played for pride, and even that didn’t end right.
This guy blows it on every big occasion. The media hype that surrounds him is not merited by his results.
One article the other day praised his summer transfer business; look at the Aberdeen fan forums though. They are furious that crucial areas of the team – such as the left back berth – were left completely untouched. They aren’t convinced.
No-one should be any longer. The emperor has no clothes. The McInnes myth has been proven just that. This is a bottler who can’t handle pressure, and nobody who fits that description can be considered a top manager.
Remember, a thing only has value based on what people believe it is worth. Value is what someone is willing to pay on a given day. The McInnes myth is a media invention, spun by his pals, desperate to turn him into a contender at Aberdeen so that he might seem like a viable saviour at Ibrox. None of it stands up to examination.
Gavin Berry, in the Scotsman, tore him apart last night for the ease with which he was tactically outfoxed by Motherwell’s Robinson and by Sevco’s Murty. His achievements at Aberdeen, such as they are, are more about having better players than some of the other clubs than they are about actual tactical nous. On that front, he is hopeless.
And his stock is decreasing rapidly. The media will continue to talk him up, because some of them still think he’s Ibrox bound, but in the stands there’s a growing feeling that if he does go to Ibrox it’ll be no great loss. The Aberdeen supporters know his value alright.
For them, the bubble is well and truly burst.