What follows is a morality tale for the modern age. It stars me, an idiot, and may produce strong feelings of schadenfreude in you, hopefully not an idiot. Ready? Let us begin.

Once upon a time, like, a year ago, cryptocurrency was going gangbusters. (I do hope you can keep up with this technical language; crypto can be complicated.) It had made the transition from being an obsession for nerdy libertarians (and the preferred currency of drug dealers) to becoming a topic of mainstream conversation. And prices were rocketing – bitcoin, the original and most well-known cryptocurrency, reached a record high of almost $20,000 (£15,500) shortly before Christmas last year. Staggering, when you remember that one bitcoin was worth about $13 five years earlier. People who had gambled on cryptocurrencies early on were getting insanely rich.

Meanwhile, I was getting incredibly irritated. Dammit, I thought, as prices went up and up and up. Why hadn’t I bought bitcoin back in 2013, when I first started writing about it? I would like to say it was because of my concern about its disastrous environmental impact. (New units of bitcoin are “mined” by computers solving complex maths problems – which takes a ton of energy.) However, the honest answer is that I didn’t want to waste my money.

That concern, along with all my common sense, went out of the window, as prices kept rising. While I was sure the bitcoin boom was a bubble, a little voice inside me kept asking: what if it’s not? What if the e-vangelists are right and cryptocurrency really is the future? A struggle between avarice and prudence raged within me – and avarice won; I bought some bitcoin. I also bought ethereum, which is probably the second-best-known virtual currency. I won’t divulge how much I bought because my mum is probably reading this, and I don’t want her to get mad at me. Suffice to say, it was an amount I could afford to lose – but not without feeling a bit queasy.

Now, if you have been keeping an eye on cryptocurrency prices, you will not be surprised to hear that I’m feeling a bit queasy. Virtual currency seems to have entered a death spiral, with prices plummeting since early November. Bitcoin, worth about $4,200 at the time of writing, lost nearly a quarter of its value in a week. Ethereum, worth more than $1,200 at the beginning of the year, is now valued at about $130.

There are various reasons for crypto’s woes, including hacks and regulatory crackdowns. However, the most important factor may well be the fact that the crypto boom was never real to begin with; experts reckon last year’s sky-high bitcoin prices were probably the result of manipulation rather than legitimate demand. The US Justice Department has reportedly just opened an investigation into whether traders on a cryptocurrency exchange called Bitfinex were driving up prices using various unscrupulous, and illegal, market tricks. This follows a study published in the summer by a University of Texas finance professor who specialises in financial fraud, which estimated at least half of bitcoin’s price jump last year was a result of price manipulation.

While the current crypto-crash is bad news for my finances, it is better news for the environment. With bitcoin’s price plummeting, mining the currency is no longer profitable, and a number of mining operations are closing down. This isn’t to say we should expect to see the end of cryptocurrency, however. Far from it. As the visionary economist Jamiroquai once said, the future is made of virtual insanity.