It’s been over eight years since I first heard of that something called bitcoin.
Libertarian Dream: A "decentralized" currency that is not controlled by any state; which no central bank can influence; which, thanks to "blockchain" technology, is impossible to falsify and which offers anonymity that only cache knows.
A currency whose total amount is fixed in advance, so its value growth is implanted in its DNA.
And that is another currency that can be obtained for free, but on merit, because bitcoins are created by your computer solving a complicated mathematical problem behind which one of these magic coins is "hiding".
The fact that the whole system was devised by a mysterious mathematical genius known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who may or may not exist, and that the entire financial establishment attacked the whole bitcoin mania with a combination of ridicule and repressive threats, could only hasten my decision to I buy an XFX ATI RADEON HD 5870 graphics card for some 200 euros (the maximum I could forgive myself from a modest journalistic salary) and join another big gold rush, some 150 years after the original, California one.
However, as can be assumed from the fact that I am writing this text today instead of practicing diving on a tropical island, fate did not want me to get rich by mining bitcoins.
It turned out, namely, that my powerful graphics card does not fit my rather incompetent motherboard, so with the help of the worst "cost-benefit" analysis in the history of business, I concluded that it is better to sell a graphics card with a loss of 20 euros and forget about everything. for the sake of my game I change the whole computer.
That mistake cost me about $ 700,000.
Unfortunately, I would have so much today if I turned a failed investment in the wrong hardware into a novelty called cryptocurrency, at the then exchange rate of 10 dollars per coin, instead of "forgetting everything".
Bitcoin, it turns out, has become a pretty big deal.
With an exchange rate of $ 40,000 for one bitcoin, with international banks speculating in this currency, with nuclear scientists arrested for harboring Russian state supercomputers to mine bitcoin for them, with newspaper reports of people going to countries with cheap electricity to install entire warehouses full of computers searching for bitcoin, and even with the latest stories blaming bitcoin for the fact that 200 million people fell in electricity in Pakistan and that 500 million Europeans almost lost their lights, there is no doubt that bitcoin is something big.
And yet, that something big still persists - nothing.
No matter how seductive the incredible price of $ 40,000 may seem, bitcoin enthusiasts have already experienced it once, exactly two years ago, when this currency reached $ 20,000 for the first time in a meteoric rise in just a few weeks, and then just as abruptly equally inexplicably she pushed back, leaving many with a large and not at all virtual hole in their pocket.
The main problem with bitcoin, the cause of its characteristic instability - huge jumps and equally spectacular falls - is that no one knows what it is useful for.
No matter how exciting the whole story about money that is out of government control, that offers anonymity of transactions and that is allegedly impossible to counterfeit, the fact is that the average person does not need any of that.
Specifically, bitcoin - except in a narrow circle of cases - does not offer anything that you can no longer get with your currency that you need.
For anonymity, cash is enough for most, the risk of counterfeiting is small enough to be negligible, and state control and independence from monetary authorities are stories that may be intellectually interesting to people, but will not force anyone to use a virtual currency in practice.
That is why bitcoin remained the money mostly used for illegal transactions - buying data from hackers, selling drugs and the like - where anonymity and electronic money transfer are more important than anything.
Then why is the price of bitcoin rising?
Because everyone buys bitcoins hoping that their price will jump and that they will make money.
As demand grows, so does price and expectation is met.
Then when the demand disappears, and that will happen when everyone who has just heard about bitcoin buys virtual coins seeing how much the price has risen in recent days, the price will start to fall.
Because - nobody needs bitcoins and nobody wants to keep them. All everyone wants is to buy them, to have their price "jump" for some reason, and then to exchange them for "real money".
In that game, which is constantly repeated as a new wave of publicity occurs, someone of course has to lose.
Bitcoin will not achieve stability and will not be able to express its "deflationary" nature, which everyone relies on to permanently raise the value of the coins they own, until its purpose as a currency is found.
Until a large enough number of people want to hold and use bitcoins for what each currency is intended for - to buy goods and services.
Drugs, weapons, blackmail and other areas of the criminal economy are not enough to achieve such stability.
The main problem is the battle
ina is therefore its emptiness.
Bitcoin is not the gold of our time. It's more mud.