Bitcoin was supposed to change the world. What happened?
Bitcoin was struck the fatal blow when the bubble popped and Mt. Gox died. Everything since has been nostalgia for its past dreams.<p>The main problem is that it was built on crank economic assumptions. It is <i>literally</i> an implementation of Federal Reserve&#x2F;gold bug conspiracist economic theories and weird Bircher ideas of where inflation comes from - that&#x27;s actually its point. The white paper alludes to this, the Bitcoin 0.1 release notes are clear about it:<p>&gt; The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that&#x27;s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.<p>Bitcoin failed at every one of the aspirations here. The price is ridiculously volatile and has had multiple bubbles (this should be impossible with a fixed supply if Bitcoin economic theories were true); the unregulated exchanges (with no central bank backing) front-run their customers, paint the tape to manipulate the price, and are hacked or just steal their users&#x27; funds; and transaction fees and the unreliability of transactions make micropayments completely unfeasible. Because all of this is based in crank ideas that don&#x27;t work in practice.<p>Ethereum is hipper, but has similar problems with ever working properly. (Remember the Skype chat where the devs admitted sorting out its problems would take several years?) Its basic problem is that smart contracts require humans to program perfectly, and even the <i>best and brightest</i> of Ethereum coders came up with The DAO, a $150 million clustercuddle.<p>If you follow the &quot;Venezuelans are turning to Bitcoin&quot; link, you&#x27;ll see the actual number is ... 370 BTC traded a week. This may not rock the central banksters to their foundations.<p>Almost all Bitcoin use is speculation on Chinese exchanges; day trader gambling, basically. I need to find the figures, but it&#x27;s something like 95-97%. Next is the drug trade, next is ransomware. Western Bitcoin advocates are a sideshow, except the actual core developers.<p>(I am literally writing a book on this, God help me. I have read more and worse PDF white papers than any human should have to suffer. Currently 30k words and six weeks into writing a 15k short I was supposed to take 2 days on. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidgerard.co.uk&#x2F;blockchain&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidgerard.co.uk&#x2F;blockchain&#x2F;</a> )