Ricky Gutierrez

BTC has finally achieved something remarkable. It has managed to lose the only utility its supporters ever cared about. Coin go up. Not payments. Not commerce. Not micropayments. Not programmable money. Not an economically useful transaction system. Just coin go up. For years, every criticism was answered with the intellectual sophistication of a drunken gambler pointing at a rising chart. Who needs utility when the next fool will pay more? But what happens when coin stops going up? Suddenly, the revolutionary financial system has a rather embarrassing problem. Its entire economic proposition was dependent on someone else arriving with a larger wallet and a smaller understanding of economics. A technology whose greatest achievement is convincing people to hold it rather than use it is not much of a monetary revolution. It's a speculative queue. And when the queue stops growing, the magnificent philosophy of “number go up” becomes the rather less inspiring reality of “who's buying next?” BTC: a solution in search of a problem, a currency nobody wants to spend, and an investment thesis reduced to three words. Coin. Go. Up. Except now, apparently, it doesn't. What a wonderfully expensive monument to bullshit.