For anyone who has been under a rock or in a cabin in Canada or something for the past thirty-six hours, the price of Bitcoins has crumbled. After hitting a high of 266 filthy fiat dollars per tulip bulb, the price crumpled as thousands of people stepped back and realized they’d made a terrible mistake. The resulting selloff once more devastated the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange‘s servers, pushing the lag up to over an hour, allowing us to watch the price topple down the charts like distant starlight reaching the Earth for the first time in millennia. It finally settled at a low of $105 before jumping back up to $200, then back down, then up, then down, up and down like a yo-yo. Relatively smarter people and panic sellers got out, while the true believers rode it all the way down, despite their losses.

GIF credit @bakedinapie

MtGOX finally admitted that they were not being DDoSed, instead announcing that they are merely incompetent and unprepared for actual web and exchange traffic. They then pulled the brakes and halted all trading entirely to let the market “cool down” following the price crashing.

Meanwhile, trading continued at smaller exchanges, with the prices falling well below $100 as wary “investors” jump ship. Many of them have experienced their own issues from the flood of traffic, with Bitfloor crying wolf DDoS.

What drove this ridiculously huge bubble? If you ask the average bitcoin chump, he’ll tell you that the citizens of Cyprus are buying up huge amounts of bitcoins to hide from their government’s “theft” as the country tries desperately to save its flailing economy. Amazing bitcoin ATMs and fantastic new bitcoin services are springing up all over the country, as well as everywhere else in Europe. None of this is true, however. Cyprus is involved, but not in the way that everyone is trumpeting. Bitcoiners saw the crisis in Cyprus and attempted to pitch their flaky “currency” to Cypriots as a way to escape government controls, hype built up around this, media attention built up around the hype, and then this all began feeding back on itself until yesterday’s reality check.

Today, prominent posts in the bitcoin subreddit included links to suicide helplines, angry screeds about MtGOX, people calling each other out for giving bad financial advice, and the occasional smuglord showing off that he’s still hoarding his buttcoins. The atmosphere there is rather deflated. Bitcointalk just wants MtGOX’s blood.

Who’s left holding the bag this time? Everybody who was gambling on the price going up uP UP forever, all the true believers who’ve been led astray by the likes of Rickard Falkvinge, Max Keiser, and Alex Jones, foolish investors who read about this newfangled “bitcoin” thing in shitty financial rags, and the Winklevoss twins (notable for such aptly named websites as “Hukkster” and “