I mean sure, but this is sort of a straw man - of course bubbles can exist even if the underlying asset has fundamental value. The Internet, housing, and tulips are all great things with value. But it’s not entirely clear to me that Bitcoin provides more value than the energy cost it requires to sustain it.

Consider the costs, both environmental and financial, to mine, secure and transport gold.

How does it compare against Bitcoin? What intrinsic value (besides "ooh, shiny") does gold actually have?

I agree that BTC and cryptocurrencies generally are utterly wasteful, but what too many look at is the headline figure of energy consumed, and not what energy is being consumed.

Disclaimer: I think BTC is a total waste of time, and I am long BTC because I think it'll buy me a house one day too.

(EDIT: I also have gold too)

Gold is used to make electronics cheaper, and it's used in medicine.

Shiny gold prevents oxidation on electrical contacts and makes your computer work. In most chips there is a bit of gold, not a lot, so there is value in that.

Isn't platinum better for that?

platinum is more electrically resistive (less conductive) and more expensive than gold

Gold can be used to make jewelry which is a big cultural thing in most of the Old World. It's still "ooh shiny" but it has value in being a tangible "shiny" good used to keep up appearances and show status.

I don't know how you can show status with Bitcoin though. Maybe show your server farm or something.

Most of the bitcoins i bought are super shiney! did you get dull ones?

> a lot of people also tried to get in on the dot com bubble

Ex ante, it is difficult to differentiate a Pets.com from an Amazon, or a dot com bubble from a beanie baby boom.

> it is difficult to differentiate a Pets.com from an Amazon

Arguably a small minority were able to differentiate and it paid off very well for them.

They may feel like they were able to differentiate, but without an actual explanation of how they differentiated, we can’t determine whether they differentiated or whether they got lucky.

> a small minority were able to differentiate and it paid off very well for them

True. But from a policy perspective this punts the problem. Ex ante, identifying the president from the deluded is difficult.

> identifying the president from the deluded

I'm guessing you might have meant "prescient" there?

Then again, perhaps not.

The time someone explained email to me, I was immediately hooked.

But we're well over a decade into cryptocurrencies, and there is no application for them yet except crime.

That’s hardly fair. The world is full of unbanked people, people who are simply not interesting to the regular banking system and so have no access to it. Yet they have needs. Bitcoin is probably crap for this because transaction costs, but the need is still there.

My friend, this bank the unbanked meme is a tired trope that all the cryptocurrency apologists love to push. But does anyone really want to be their own bank? Consider the following...

- You could lose your wallet and have nobody to phone in to get your information back (regular banks often can help you here)

- Conversely, you may think "Gee, I should make backups of my keys!" which isn't a bad strategy, except if any one of your backups is compromised, you lose everything, and each new backup creates an inherent new risk in getting leaked

- You could get some trojan horse with steals your cryptocurrency, and once again, you're SOL

- There's a lot of moving parts that all need to be present to make cryptocurrency even remotely viable to so-called unbanked classes (I presume you mean poor people that have little means in the first place?)... like an active internet connection to talk to said blockchain, possibly even a vendor or other party even willing to deal with cryptocurrency in the first place

- The volatility swings are absolutely ridiculous

And of course let us not forget that those that simply want to transfer to someone, then have that someone quickly convert to their home currency of choice may not necessarily be possible, due to some exchange level ban by their country's exchange controls.

I wish cryptocurrency proponents would just be honest and just say they want to make a quick buck with as little effort as possible, and leveraging the peanut gallery to get here is the best way to do it.

Sounds unethical.

I've yet to see bitcoin produce anything close to the utility of something like M-Pesa for the unbanked.

Cryptocurrency/blockchain is a valuable concept the way the internet is, but Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a nice proof of concept, but as a currency it has big problems that look like they won't be solved. Pets.com was also a good proof of concept.