Bitcoin is very smart. When I first learned about it, I thought it was so cool how it all came together, the combination of cryptographic security, distributed trust, even a Forth-like mini language built in. I made my own coin, I played with the source code, I made my own nonstandard protocol that used a bitcoin blockchain (unfortunately I never bought any bitcoin, but at any given time it's a terrible investment, even if it's paid off retrospectively).

Anyway, I say all this because I really find it clever, and I really wanted it to be able to do something useful, but the reality is, it doesn't. It's never going to be useful, it's been adopted by scammers and mountebanks, it has no utility and will cause so much harms in the scams that it supports.

So while it seems like a cool innovation, and from a purely technological standpoint it is, in reality it's poison. In that regard, it has (sorry for the tired analogy) a lot in common with communism. Cool idea, doesn't work at all, destroys lives. We need to let it go.