Jordan Tuwiner

The virtual currency is looking increasingly beleaguered, and its price had been dropping steadily in recent months. . . . It is a reminder of the security issues that face any virtual currency seeking mainstream adoption, and it brings back memories of the infamous exchange Mt. Gox. . . . Combined with bitcoin’s reputation as an enabler for criminal activity, it is likely this public-image problem is hindering mainstream adoption. As one commenter on the discussion board Hacker News remarks, bitcoin is an “even worse” investment than gold.

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.

Bitcoins will go down in history as the most spectacular private Ponzi scheme in history. . . . The coins will never be the money of the future. . . . Bitcoins are too volatile in price ever to serve as a currency. . . . bitcoins are not money; dollars are money.

We’ll sign off with the simple point that unless a massive amount of new capital is transferred into Bitcoin market sharpish — which is not impossible, since there are still a number of deep pocketed believers out there — it’s hard to imagine the asset class going any other way but south. Furthermore, it’s unlikely at this stage that either price rigging, mining cartels or lower energy costs will be able to reverse that trend.

It kills any chance that bitcoin could be a mainstream currency. No one wants to hold a currency that has that great a risk of depreciating in value. Most people who put money in bitcoin wallets in 2014 and didn’t spend it instantly took a hit. It is dead, let me repeat, dead, as a mainstream currency.

And that Bitcoin could only survive at the margins, where it would be isolated, and in no position to threaten Visa or Mastercard, or the underlying payment and messaging services that underpin the world financial system as it stands today. Then there’s The Oracle of Omaha who has one four letter word for bitcoin – joke.

Bitcoin’s defects will hasten its demise in 2015 . . . Bitcoin’s flaws are becoming more evident, which may explain why prices more than halved in 2014. That trend should continue.

A writer for The Washington Post argues bitcoin’s system is doomed to fail because governments have a lot of say when it comes to any financial system and can put pressure on those intuitions as it sees fit.

Right now, Bitcoin is only mostly dead. As an investment, it was the worst of 2014. . . . The problem, though, is that Bitcoin will likely not survive to get to that level of innovation. Will Bitcoin enthusiasts support it after they realize it has ceased to be useful as a currency and is a terrible investment? Not likely. At some point they are going to realize that they are subsidizing Bitcoin for theoretical and emotional reasons so that it can be exploited by regulation-seeking venture capitalists. When that happens Bitcoin will shift from being mostly dead to being all dead.

But Bitcoin is doomed as a payments network — the very point at which it looks as though it is likely to be widely deployed is the point at which governments, like that of the United States, will crack down on it.