Bitcoin Just Hit a New All Time High in US Dollars
What I&#x27;m always missing from the discussion around bitcoin and its price is: what are reasonable KPI&#x27;s to measure its success, its impact, its utility etc.<p>When you want to value an organisation or company, it makes sense to look at these KPIs. They could be purely financial, e.g. profits, revenue, margins. Or they could be more fundamental, number of users, or rather, number of times a person has benefitted (e.g. # of one-night stands or relationships that Tinder generated).<p>What are these KPIs or metrics for bitcoin, that can tell us it has value, beyond the speculative?<p>When I invested in bitcoin in 2013, there was a lot of work to get user-adoption. It was seen as the way forward, also to create a return on your investment. we used to track numbers on # of wallets, # of daily transactions, # of merchants accepting bitcoin, # of volume on exchanges. Over time it began harder to differentiate true numbers from fake numbers, e.g. exchanges became notorious for faking transaction volume as a marketing tool. But overal, the general idea was that after 2015 or so, the number of real-world transactions and active (non-zero volume) merchants either declined, or in later years at least was not growing at remotely the same rates as the price of bitcoin.<p>Whereas I used to use bitcoin for various things and saw others do it, too, today I can hardly point to a single person or company which has utilised bitcoin in a way that isn&#x27;t speculative. There&#x27;s no positive KPI or metric that I can point to, except speculative ones (e.g. price).<p>If I survey my friends, the only reason they give to buy bitcoin, is that there&#x27;s an expectation the price will keep going up. Yet, the work on user-adoption of bitcoin (i.e., real-world usage, not merely investing) seems like it&#x27;s not at all part of anyone&#x27;s calculus.<p>That&#x27;s the reason I sold all my bitcoin some time ago. Although I would not at all be surprised that the price will keep growing, I can forgive myself and justify me having sold. But if the price falls it&#x27;d be entirely reasonable, and I wouldn&#x27;t be able to justify my choice not to sell.<p>There is obvious real technology here in having a database&#x2F;ledger that&#x27;s not under control of 1 centralised party. But a decade later I&#x27;m not seeing anyone exploit that value outside of the speculative investment side.<p>Btw, I believe there&#x27;s potential long-term value in bitcoin merely as a store of value, a digital gold. But right now there&#x27;s still a pretense of something more. Second, the store of value ideal only applies to one coin, not the trillion other crypto variants. And it requires trust and faith (over decades&#x2F;centuries) in one particular fork of Bitcoin. There&#x27;s only one chemical that&#x27;s pure gold, but one could create infinitely many bitcoin forks.