> The summer of 2015 BTC was around $200, it's now over $3,000- so up 15X in a bit over 2 years. This is failure?
As a modern eTulip bubble, it's a "success" for anyone who has made money speculating.
As a replacement for fiat money, it's an absolute disaster as a currency. Volatility and high transaction fees have killed any opportunity Bitcoin may have had to gain traction as a way to pay for anything besides drugs, ransomware, and evading currency controls.
You can send several million dollars in under a day for about $0.50 right now. IS that "high fees"? Hell if you do it right you can do it in under an hour for under a dollar.
Any talk about it being a replacement for fiat money is evading my point. I made the point that it was a plausible good store of value, not currency.
Oh, and by the way, there's nothing wrong with using bitcoin to pay for drugs, and this argument is akin to saying that the US Dollar is evil because it is so widely used in the drug trade that every $20 bill tests positive for cocaine (so I've heard.)
As for evading currency controls, aka economic oppression- that's one of the great uses of Bitcoin that will help improve people's lives world wide.
Finally regarding tulips, you can't have it both ways- you can't say price going up is proof it's a mania and price going down is proof it's a mania. Tulips were not a revolutionary new technology.
If someone actually paid that small of a fee in BTC for several million USD, they would risk far more of their transaction being lost due to volatility during the multi-hour long transaction.
Anyone holding that much BTC, and facilitating that type of transaction will likely be subject to some form of regulatory scrutiny, sooner or later.
The usefulness as a currency or as anything else is irrelevant. Getting rich is the goal. It doesn't matter that the money comes from a bigger fool, or from someone who has to buy bitcoin to pay a ransom.
As a modern eTulip bubble, it's a "success" for anyone who has made money speculating.
As a replacement for fiat money, it's an absolute disaster as a currency. Volatility and high transaction fees have killed any opportunity Bitcoin may have had to gain traction as a way to pay for anything besides drugs, ransomware, and evading currency controls.