“It’s not a currency now, it’s a pretend currency,” Robinson said. “It does not qualify or satisfy the requirements for a modern currency. The problem with disruptive technologies is that the disrupted has something to say about it. I say 10 years from now we will all have digital currencies – fiat currencies – and bitcoin will be remembered probably much like Pogs and Sinclair’s C5.”
One of the signs that Bitcoin is dying is that hardly anyone actually uses the currency. . . . The Bitcoin network is fading away and the price is destined to continue its downward march. This is likely to be the last year people take Bitcoin seriously (if last year wasn’t already). Whether Bitcoin disappears with a bang or a whimper, the end is coming.
At this point, it’s merely a speculative commodity, just like tulip bulbs centuries ago or even Beanie Babies more recently. . . . Bitcoin has peaked and is very unlikely to escalate significantly in value again. . . . It’s basically an elaborate Ponzi scheme. . . . While I don’t relish anyone losing money, Bitcoin basically went out of the way to make itself vulnerable. For this reason, it is destined to fail.
The Bitcoin is dead. Or is it? Well, not yet. But it will be very, very soon.
Even if the price of Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero, the chances the Bitcoin community convincing the wider public, governments, and industry that Bitcoin really represents the future of the world’s digital economy will become extremely unlikely. . . . this grand technological experiment may have run its course.
The Swiss Franc might be the currency getting all the attention, but the real blood bath is in Bitcoin. Remember how Bitcoin was supposed to change everything? And the dollar was dead? Boy, was that ever wrong. . . . Some are suggesting that the precipitous decline in the currency is probably its death knell.
Bitcoin is proving a big disappointment. . . . There’s almost certainly more bad news to come. The electronic token has lots of enduring problems. As a store of value that is not subject to government intervention, it lacks the support of authorities and is always in danger of being banned. . . . Defenders of Bitcoin have not given up hope. Their emphasis has shifted though, from the currency to the underlying blockchain processing software. . . . But it will not bring up the price of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin the currency may be dying, but it doesn’t matter. . . . Certainly, a trend line from November 2013 to now, extrapolated forwards, intersects worthlessness sometime later this year. . . . This could create a negative feedback loop as miners retire, the network becomes less secure and resilient, investors lose faith, and the price drops further.
Bitcoin isn’t going to replace any fiat currencies as long as it feels intuitively safer for most people to keep their savings in a bank account instead of in a digital wallet. . . . This brings us to the current crisis in Bitcoin: far from widespread adoption giving it resilience and reliability, the system may be starting to fall apart. . . . These issues add up to what we’re seeing now – the slow, inexorable decline in the price of a digital currency with no value beyond the trust in the system.
If Bitcoin were a currency, it’d be the worst-performing one in the world, worse even than the Russian ruble. But Bitcoin isn’t a currency. It’s a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. . . . But in the long run, we’re all dead, and Bitcoin might be too.
