The falling prices have been serious enough to prompt online posts with suicide hotlines for virtual currency investors in despair.

The declines are likely to be particularly painful for people who took out debt to buy virtual currencies at high prices. Even the lows hit on Wednesday are still well up — some 1,000 percent — from where Bitcoin began 2017. But that is little comfort for the people who purchased late last year.

One person on Reddit wrote about persuading family members to buy digital tokens late in 2017 and regretting it.

“Fast forward to today,” the user, going by the screen name PM_ME_UR_ROOM_VIEW, wrote. “I opened my phone and I find a barrage of messages from them accusing me of scamming them and tricking them into crypto because they lost money, I tried to explain to them that this is normal and it will bounce back soon and it’s just a correction and don’t sell but they aren’t listening.”

For skeptics of virtual currencies, the falling prices have provided some vindication.

“Most people are buying Bitcoin, not because of a belief in its future as a global currency, but because they expect it to rise in value,” a note from economists at Capital Economics said on Wednesday. “Accordingly, it has all the hallmarks of a classic speculative bubble, which we expect to burst.”