A good product for what, exactly? Fast, decentralized, small monetary transactions? Because right now BTC is pretty awful at that.

>A good product for what, exactly?

Since its inception it's an exceptionally good store of value over the medium to long term.

Not quite. Bitcoin has been an excellent bet. The economic notion of "store of value" requires stability, but Bitcoin is definitely not stable. Just today it fell 10%, and nobody would be surprised if it were to drastically exceed its previous peak next week.

> nobody would be surprised if it were to drastically exceed its previous peak next week.

Apparently CBOE would be somewhat to very surprised.

It used to be a decent currency, it stopped being that a couple of months ago.

Following the peak 4 years ago it was 80% down after 1 year, 50% down after 2 years and had not yet recovered after 3 years... it doesn’t look so exceptionally good as a store of value.

I think the point would not be to crash the market. The point would be to use the unregulated market to harvest money from people who don't know better.

This happens all the time even in well regulated markets. Whether it's tricky fund rules, hidden fee structures, selling bogus investment strategies, ponzi schemes, market manipulation, front running, or simply choosing a trading strategy that plays off of other trading strategies, if there is a way to separate the pigs and sheep from their money, someone will try it.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/wall-stre...

Bitcoin is now in a situation where they have a very hard time doing a fork, because with every fork they risk having some people remaining on the old code and claiming to be the true bitcoin.

Thus bitcoin can no longer evolve. We all know what happens to things that do not evolve.

Ethereum on the other hand is putting a time bomb into their code that forces them to fork every year or so. There is no risk of people remaining on the old code.

That's why the opening of BTC futures is so interesting.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/inside-bi...

1. Most of the market at that point is filled with 'get-rich-quick' people. 2. It's not regulated and can be gamed like above. (I understand that not being regulated is also it's biggest selling point)

It's probably like a great social network totally filled with 'tag-your-friend' posts.

pump and dump without all the regulators coming after you post dump