After the Bust, Are Bitcoins More Like Tulip Mania or the Internet?
I knew about Bitcoin quite early and always believed (absurdly incorrect with 20&#x2F;20 hindsight) that the price ought to correlate to the &quot;actual&quot; utility of bitcoins, i.e how many transactions were performed to purchase goods and services. I imagined a future where bitcoins would be used for micro transactions online, illegal purchases (drugs&#x2F;≈Wikileaks&#x2F;banned stuff in dictatorships) and by people in hyper inflationary economies. I speculated that if the price would reach multiple thousands of USD per BTC, we would have seen massive adoption for even mainstream uses.<p>It&#x27;s so strange, because I love the ideology behind it and the decentralised technology, and by many measurements bitcoin and other crypto initiatives would be considered a somewhat success if we didn&#x27;t have the price to look at. That I can pseudo anonymously (or completely anonymous with stuff like zCash&#x2F;Monero) transfer a token of wealth over the internet without a central party is so cool.<p>But I&#x27;m afraid that almost all of the price increase is simply a hype&#x2F;speculation&#x2F;hold-cycle that inevitable never will survive.