How to Predict Bitcoin Future Price with Myspace

Published in

IQ Coin Ventures

4 min readMay 19, 2018

At the time of this writing, there are 159,179,499,347 good reasons for investors to care about the future of Bitcoin. With a market capitalization in the billions (USD), Bitcoin may seem too big to fail.

We’ve seen things like this before. What can history tell us?

Myspace was an incredible phenomenon. Its exponential growth began in 2004 and continued for over two years. It seemed every news channel was celebrating the virtues of this new “social network” that could bring friends and families together in wonderful new ways.

Then, it was finished. Seventy-six million people gradually realized the party was over. Reasons for leaving were varied and personal, but one thing can’t be ignored: Myspace rose with tremendous free media coverage, and collapsed when the press cycle turned negative.

Press often turns cruel after being kind. That’s partly because the “news” only covers what’s “new”. After so much positive coverage, the only thing left to do is criticize.

There was a lot to criticize Myspace for. Privacy was the main issue. People were learning hard lessons about the danger of oversharing. “Cyberstalking” entered the dictionary. Crimes were being facilitated.

Just as people were considering closing their Myspace accounts, along Came Facebook. It was a perfect setup. Myspace broke the ice, doing the hard job of educating people about the value of social networking. All Facebook had to do is basically say “we are like Myspace, but safer”.

In a case of the second mouse getting the cheese, Facebook was quick to capitalize on the Myspace’s misfortune. Facebook rode its own positive news wave until overtaking its member count in 2008.

Bitcoin Price and Myspace

The media has been pretty good to Bitcoin. First as a curiosity, then a potential industry disrupter, and now with stories of teenage “bitcoin millionaires”.

But we've already seen the tide begun to turn. Stories of illicit activities enabled by Bitcoin: extortion, trafficking, ransom-ware, and even kidnappings. Even when other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum are involved, “Bitcoin” often gets the blame.

As with MySpace, things could get worse. For example, do you like Bitcoin for privacy? That concept goes out the window when you realize that anyone you send or receive money from instantly gains access to not only your Bitcoin balance, but also your entire transaction history. It’s like buying a pizza and giving the delivery person a printout of your entire bank account, plus perpetual future access. There are several techniques to prevent this, but just one misconfiguration could penetrate your privacy.

As bitcoin.org warns:

Bitcoin is not anonymous. Some effort is required to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances. This is one reason why Bitcoin addresses should only be used once. Always remember that it is your responsibility to adopt good practices in order to protect your privacy.

You can easily imagine the privacy horror stories we’ll be hearing over the next few years.

Being a fast follower has a lot of advantages in business. The prime mover gets a lot of attention but often misses the mark and fails to hold its dominant position.

While social networks and cryptocurrencies are quite different, one thing that rules them both is public sentiment. So if we’ve learned anything from Myspace and Facebook, we would expect this transition to a more secure and private currency to happen soon after the negative new cycle begins.