OK. The reason all this happening is that Bitcoin really did go to the moon. That's what powers all this speculation. If the price of Bitcoin had been stable for a decade, and it worked reliably, it would be a useful medium of exchange, but nobody would care. This is all about MAKE MONEY FAST.
Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitcoin is the scammers dream - remote, anonymous, irreversible transactions. Much less risk of the mark coming for the scammer with a baseball bat.
Then China cracked down on cryptocurrency, shut down all the miners, and arrested a few hundred of them. Financial regulators in the more legit countries started regulating Bitcoin exchanges, so the operators couldn't just steal the money. Know Your Customer became a thing. In the US, the IRS, FinCen, the FBI, and the SEC all started paying attention to what was happening on blockchains. Cryptocurrency crime was no longer risk-free for the crooks.
But by now, sheer momentum kept Bitcoin going up. That's a powerful force. It's not forever, though. Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser.
That's what provides the engine behind "Web3", NFTs, DAOs, and whatnot. It's not the technology.
Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitcoin is the scammers dream - remote, anonymous, irreversible transactions. Much less risk of the mark coming for the scammer with a baseball bat.
Then China cracked down on cryptocurrency, shut down all the miners, and arrested a few hundred of them. Financial regulators in the more legit countries started regulating Bitcoin exchanges, so the operators couldn't just steal the money. Know Your Customer became a thing. In the US, the IRS, FinCen, the FBI, and the SEC all started paying attention to what was happening on blockchains. Cryptocurrency crime was no longer risk-free for the crooks.
But by now, sheer momentum kept Bitcoin going up. That's a powerful force. It's not forever, though. Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser.
That's what provides the engine behind "Web3", NFTs, DAOs, and whatnot. It's not the technology.