“If someone is depressed by the sudden drop in price, remember that many of us are going through the same thing,” read one post on Reddit, which got more than 400 responses. “Please don’t think nothing crazy. You can use my thread to vent.”

Bitcoins can be used to pay for things online, but they have mostly been treated as an investment because there is a cap of 21 million on the number of Bitcoin that will ever be released. The records of all Bitcoins are maintained by a network of computers around the world. The creator of Bitcoin, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, has never been tracked down, though many have tried.

For a time, Bitcoin was known as the currency of drug dealers and other bad actors skulking on the internet. In recent months, hedge funds and ordinary investors around the world have piled into Bitcoin, lured by the promise of a borderless digital investment with no one in charge. That has pushed the price of Bitcoin up from $1,000 at the beginning of the year to more than $19,000 this week, with its run-up raising comparisons to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s and the late 1990s dot-com boom.

Yet when the virtual currency, which is highly volatile, experienced its fall late Thursday and early Friday, many of its new fans were unprepared. The downturn hit not just Bitcoin, but almost every other virtual currency that has soared over the last year. Ethereum, and lesser-known tokens like EOS and ZCash, fell even more sharply than Bitcoin.

Vadim Semenov, 24, a programmer in New York, had maxed out the credit lines on two credit cards to buy $35,000 of Bitcoin on Monday, when the currency’s price was briefly above $19,000. Bitcoin’s dive left him feeling unmoored on Friday morning.