If it is the end of bitcoin, that's sad for Isabella since she's invested so much time in covering it. The only place she could have got that chart is on these forums, so she must be reading the material here. She's invested in it as well, even though she has put herself on the opposite side to most of us!

Bitcoin remains highly risky. It's a call option on a new financial system, and carries the same level of risk as a call option.

Half of the problem has been a wave of douchebags who think it's the 'next big thing' to speculate on, encouraged by a wave of brokers, "bitcoin binary options", bitcoin pit trading, etc.. The ironic thing is that most of these offerings only emerged after the price topped out at the end of last year.

Would you buy and sell a call option on apple in the way people buy+sell bitcoin? Would you create trading apps, charts, ATMs and all other sorts of things for a call option, that could one day be worth zero?

I think that's the way to look at bitcoin.

Having said that, the world is right up shit creek financially and otherwise in almost all respects, so the argument that we are living in exceptional circumstances is pretty valid IMO.

In retrospect a massive crash this year was obvious and probably it's not the last time it will happen.

TL;DR

I'm taking this FT article as a load of tosh, since usually their calls are wrong