Coindesk released 2018 bitcoin and blockchain industry report

This is not your father's investment bubble

Bitcoin went on a super run in 2017 with returns for the year at 1,278 percent. Along with all the mainstream attention came discussion of whether the original and still largest cryptocurrency was in a bubble.

Our own readers were split on this, with about 49 percent answering "yes," 39 percent saying "no" and 11 percent who were neutral. Deeper than this split of opinion, our survey provided a much needed data point around the whole speculative bubble conversation.

Only 19 percent of our respondents went into debt to buy crypto, and of those who did, over half paid back their loans. The important and historic takeaway is that if bitcoin is indeed a bubble, it is the rare kind that has inflated with little leverage or borrowed money. (Margin trading on the exchanges was recently introduced, but it is limited and typically offered on a peer-to-peer basis.)

In short, bitcoin has made it this far without help from Wall Street or banks (unless you count the wholesale closing of accounts to certain industries and geographies by risk-averse financial institutions, which may inadvertently drive those de-banked users to use a permissionless system).

This marks the first time in recent memory average people have been ahead of the so-called "smart money" – another chapter in the ongoing narrative that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are the most interesting story worldwide in finance and economics