2015

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.

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.