Bitcoin: A symptom of market mania — or the new gold? 10 Jan, 2021 07:34 PM 6 minutes to read Bitcoin is muscling in on a space long occupied by gold. Photo / Getty Images Financial Times By: Merryn Somerset Webb The price of bitcoin has soared eightfold since March. It was US$5,000 (NZ$6,900) a coin then. It was over US$40,000 (NZ$55,000) this week. It is one of the best-performing things you could have held since the pandemic began. That will have felt great for its early adopters. But it now leaves pretty much everyone in the markets in something of a quandary. Do we buy or do we sell? This is the royal we . . . my own bitcoin holding is not big enough to bother selling. Is the exponential rise in the price of bitcoin yet another symptom of the outbreak of speculative mania in markets, a spillover from the rampant overvaluation of the US tech sector that will eventually prove to have no intrinsic value at all and fall to zero or thereabouts?