The end is not nigh until she tells you she invested your inheritance into it.

Similarly, yesterday I was at the barber's and 4 people were discussing Bitcoin. I texted a friend that we've reached peak hype, and it's time to sell.

I had a Lyft driver talking to me about it a couple weeks ago. The same driver who drove for Lyft in part because they paid him immediately which was good because he really needed to get new tires. (Pro tip: Probably not something you want to discuss with your current passenger.)

I went to a funeral, and the son of the deceased asked me about investing in Bitcoin! Quite a flag.

That’s also a sign that bitcoin could become the worlds most popular currency someday. Recognition and interest need to become ubiquitous.

The general public is not talking about using bitcoin as a currency, or converting their daily spending habits into bitcoin, or even about the underlying tech and possible future applications for it. All of the "average-joe" hype is around getting rich quick off of it's meteoric rise. That's what scares me the most.

Bitcoin was being more used as currency two years ago than today.

Bitcoin has some very serious problems with governance (code and policy governance that is, regulation governance is finally starting to happen, whether it will be good for bitcoin remains to be seen) which has led to very serious throughput problems (standard bitcoin can handle only 7tx/sec maximum, visa does up to 4,000tx/sec on it's busiest days) and cost problems (constrained throughput has pushed up transaction fees considerably compared to just a year ago). Bitcoin could increase it's maximum block size to 512MB to compensate but that would drastically increase the size of the blockchain as well as increase the cost of mining, how much that would decrease transaction fees is harder to determine.

Haven't you heard? Bitcoin is not a currency, and was never intended to be one; it's a "store of value"! No, really - the limited transaction rate is a feature, not a bug!