Just steel your nerves, jump in — oh, and remember to get out before the whole thing comes crashing down

Let me just say: Bubbles are fantastic. It’s never so easy for an ordinary person to make free money as during a financial mania. Just steel your nerves, jump in — oh, and remember to get out before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Especially that last part.

“Never miss out on a bubble,” advised the late Dan Bunting, an old friend and a successful money manager in London over many decades. “You’ll make the most money from the worst stocks.”

And so it proved. The dot-com bubble paid off my mortgage, and then some.

I never thought I’d see something so nutty again, yet it seems to be happening again. These digital currencies may be rubbish — more on that below — but it looks like we’re in big, fat bitcoin bubble right now. If so, there is seriously easy money to be made.

Bitcoin BTCUSD, +2.25% shrugged off a crash in July and is now setting new highs. It has doubled in a month, despite economic worries and the crisis in Korea.

And Fidelity, that blue-chip investment firm, just gave bitcoin the stamp of approval and will include it in its online portal.

Let the good times roll.

A staggering $1.25 billion of “fiat” — i.e., real — money has so far been raised by insiders this year rolling out new “digital coins” that will help finance their new dot-com venture or service or product, according to Coinschedule.com, a website that tracks the data.

Here’s how it works: A group of kids in hoodies say they’re going to set up a cloud computing venture and let you finance it in return for some of their new digital currency. You send them dollars. They send you new digital currency. If and when they put down the doobies long enough to get the venture rolling, you can use these new digital currencies to pay to use the service.

Read: Bitcoin rises, so people Google ‘bitcoin,’ so then bitcoin rises, so then people Google…

Don’t make me laugh. Have you ever seen anything so stupid?

Yes, I have, actually. It was 1999. If you weren’t around then, this is pretty much exactly how it went down.

Anyone over 30 was called a fuddy-duddy who just “didn’t get it.” People actually got fired for not joining in. Only afterward came the excuses and the finger-pointing. Oh, and the lawsuits.

And, I repeat: So far this year these “initial coin offerings” have raised a staggering $1.25 billion from the public. Booyah, indeed!

A couple of months back I said these cryptocurrencies are nonsense. From a serious investment standpoint that’s true. Price is a function of supply and demand. At the moment there is an endless supply of new cryptocurrencies. People are literally creating new ones every week.

Demand is uncertain, unknown and unknowable. I still have yet to hear a convincing argument why anyone needs these things other than a money launderer or someone who wants to, say, play internet poker.

Anyone who claims to come with solid valuation for any of these digital currencies is talking out of his hat. A long-term investor is betting on a poker hand with the cards face down.

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