Now, to be fair to the bitcoin bros (not great) and XRP army (worse), even the World Health Organisation had around that time started pushing the idea that Covid could be being spread by banknotes (while simultaneously recommending that people should not wear masks), now thought to be “very unlikely”. Even if banknotes were a key transmission vector, however, we are not sure that “dirty fiat” itself could be held responsible, given that the vast majority of it only exists in digital form. Why would you use bitcoin, or XRP, or any other crypto token when you can transact digitally using fiat currencies?
Identifying the determinants of asset prices is one of the most important questions in finance. Traditional asset pricing theories are founded on the idea that equity prices should be determined by fundamentals such as earnings (Gordon 1959, Campbell and Shiller 1988). In contrast, the behavioral finance literature posits that prices do not always follow fundamentals due to investor sentiment trading (Shiller 1981, Baker and Wurgler 2006, Stambaugh et al. 2012). Eventually however, equity prices seem to trace their fundamentals (Pa´stor and Veronesi, 2003, 2006, Bartram and Grinblatt 2018).

Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $68,530.34 early Tuesday, according to CoinMarketCap. That's just a few weeks after it hit a previous high of nearly $67,000 before sliding as much as 12%.
Shiba Inu coin is trading up at approximately $0.00005580 (£0.00004113) as of 2.45pm today after smashing through multiple record highs in late October.