It's been a rough time for the bitcoin recently. It plunged 60 percent last year, then lost another 30 percent early this year, as investors cast doubt on the digital currency's longevity.
Star investor Jeff Gundlach, CEO of DoubleLine Capital, is one of the doubters. "Bitcoin is on its way to being relegated to the ash heap of digital currencies," he said in a webcast Tuesday,
Business Insider reported.
The bitcoin traded at $219 Thursday afternoon, according to CoinDesk, after dropping to a low of $174.94 earlier in the day.
Some early bitcoin devotees are starting to jump off the bandwagon.
"The people who most believed in the long-term value of bitcoin holdings are the people who got hurt the most," Chase Sechrist, a 22-year software developer in Austin, Texas, told The Wall Street Journal. www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-plunge-bites-miners-1421281616
He put $30,000, or "most of his savings," into bitcoin, starting "at the top of the summer 2014 hype cycle." Now that he's lost almost all of that, Sechrist said he’ll stay "out of bitcoin for quite a while," though he still believes in its payment technology.
To be sure, not everyone has soured on the bitcoin. That includes venture capital star
Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz. He stresses that bitcoin's usefulness is as a payments system not an investment.
"Attacking bitcoin for having speculative levels of volatility is missing the point of how the system was designed for this point in time," he tweeted.
"In the short run, bitcoin is still highly useful as a transaction and trust network in many uses cases even with high volatility," he wrote in another
tweet.
© 2025 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.