So what does this mean for Bitcoin’s value? Is it just a normal month in the ever-turbulent-yet-often-soaring life of cryptocurrencies? Or is there something different going on?

There’s no doubting the long-term rise in value of Bitcoin. Anyone who bought Bitcoin this time last year is still up by 350pc, even after May’s sharp fall in valuation. Anyone who bought five years ago is up (4,100pc). And for ‘hodlers’ (those who hold Bitcoin in the belief that its value is going to the moon in the long term) who have owned Bitcoin for over five years, they are now relatively wealthy people.

So does the cryptocurrency’s current dip in value represent a decent opportunity to buy? Or is the whole thing just a big house of cards?

“We will never tell any of our clients to invest in cryptocurrencies,” says David Bergin, a senior trader at Ireland’s second largest securities brokerage, Goodbody.

“It’s just too risky as an asset class. That said, there is an awful lot of investor interest in cryptocurrency. You can see it from both talking to clients and people you’d know using apps like Revolut.”

Irish people are among the most enthusiastic buyers of Bitcoin in Europe, according to one recent survey.

The research, from money management app Plum, claims that people in this country are putting in 92pc more than those in Britain, France or Spain.

This is backed up by those whose companies facilitate Irish people trading in cryptocurrencies.

Earlier this year, the co-founder of one of Ireland’s main crypto exchanges, where punters can buy or sell Bitcoin and other digital assets using a credit card or bank transfer at a cost of between 2.5pc and 6pc, told this reporter that there were 40,000 people signed up to its service. This, said James Nagle, was probably only a fraction of the actual number of people buying Bitcoin in Ireland.

“When you then take into account people trading on Coinbase, Revolut and other platforms, it’s a much bigger number,” he said.

Asked whether it might be bigger than an estimate of 180,000, posited by another Irish exchange, BitIreland, he said: “it would more likely be double that number”.

Why is crypto so popular in Ireland?

According to Plum, it may be down to the ‘early adopter’ mentality here and a natural interest in finding ‘new ways of becoming better off’.

It could also be a higher-than-usual savings rate during the pandemic.

But there’s one other reason that can’t be underestimated: Ireland’s unusually active adoption of Revolut. The payments and banking app has a relatively idiot-proof cryptocurrency purchasing tool.

The company’s user figures in Ireland are staggering. Its chief technology officer recently suggested that this stands at close to 1.5 million Irish people.

Even still, there are plenty of warnings against jumping into cryptocurrencies.

Last week, the director general of financial conduct at Central Bank, Derville Rowland, described the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies as being “of great concern”.

“Crypto assets are quite a speculative, unregulated investment,” and people should be “really aware they could lose the whole of that investment,” she said in a Bloomberg interview.

That view is shared by Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England Governor, who recently warned that cryptocurrencies do not have any intrinsic value, while JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has often repeated that Bitcoin is a “fraud”.

Some long-established traders and stockbrokers in Ireland tend to agree with this position.

“We are witnessing a giant bubble in cryptocurrencies based on the oldest lesson in the book, a speculative excess driven by too much central bank money printing,” says Rory Gillen, founder of Gillen Markets. “After all, the argument in favour of Bitcoin points to the strict limited supply of them. But are there not a myriad of cryptocurrencies popping up all over the place? So where’s the limited supply? Without an alternative use value I believe they are all worthless.”

Mr Gillen’s point about functionality is one of Bitcoin’s greatest apparent weaknesses. Other than to support a made-up digital alternative to gold, what can Bitcoin actually be used for?

Not trading as just 1.3pc of Bitcoin transactions come from merchants using it as a currency, according to a recent analysis by the US-based analyst Chainalysis. Six years ago, Stripe added Bitcoin to its payment methods but discontinued it in 2018, saying it was too slow, too impractical and resulted in high fees.

Crypto enthusiasts counter by saying fiat currencies have little utility themselves, other than state-backed promissory notes that sometimes devalue or crash.

And for all of its potential to make rings or tooth fillings, gold is essentially a useless substance too, the crypto-boosters argue; it can’t be eaten, isn’t used to build things and has little other purpose than as an anointed store of value that is based on little more than a communal agreement that it should be so.

This mental buy-in, the crypto-boosters say, isn’t all that different to the basic premise behind the rise in value of Bitcoin. Even if it’s not used to buy cars or Mars bars, there are other emerging active uses for cryptocurrencies, too.

The recent surge in ‘non fungible token’ (NFT) transactions is largely based on using Ethereum (the second biggest crypto currency after Bitcoin, with a market cap of around €300bn). That allows all sorts to new trade online, from the Irish Kevin Abosch – who has made at least €1m so far this year through NFT sales – to Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann), who sold an NFT-verified digital canvas for €60m through auctioneer Christie’s in March.

But arguably the biggest incentive behind the sustained value of Bitcoin is the very thing that sceptics say makes it worthless – its disassociation from any central bank or state authority.

“This is a future where there’s a new power balance between governments and citizens,” Peter Thiel predicted almost a decade ago. “It’s not prone to the same kind of corruption and interference that governments like to practise.”

This spirit of ultra-libertarianism has been strong enough to create a base for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to thrive.

But it’s not just Redditors or new world activists. Institutional interest in crypto currencies is real.

Last month, BNY Mellon set up a crypto hub in its Dublin office, led by ex-Consensys executive and TCD lecturer Lory Kehoe.

Other big banks here, which have had longstanding activity in exploring blockchain, are now sniffing around cryptocurrencies.

So what happens now?

Even after last month’s fall in value, Bitcoin still has an overall capitalisation of around €700bn, with other cryptocurrencies taking the overall crypto market well over €1tn. (Gold is over €10trn.)

There are currently around 18.8m Bitcoins in circulation. According to how it’s designed, there is a finite final number of 21m that can be ‘mined’.

Will it stick to its long-term trend of rising in value? Or is it set to become a footnote in history, as regulators become less tolerant for ransomware gangs’ currency of choice?

Some senior banking advisors, like Metaco’s vice president of sales Seamus Donoghue, say that a price target of between $300,000 and $500,000 per Bitcoin is “reasonable”.

“Indeed, it could well go beyond that,” Mr Donoghue recently told me.

Others like Rory Gillen say it has gotten a free ride on historically low interest rates and will fall as soon as rates rise.

“In my view, its intrinsic value is zero,” he says.

Few would bet against continued roller coaster rides for investors. But with each year that passes, Bitcoin comes closer to establishing a permanent presence.

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