[OkayPhysicist]

That was my view on it back in the early 2010's when Bitcoin was just taking off. Back then, the only people interested in it were either geeks looking at this new weird thing, or drug dealers. And frankly, the drug dealing was "healthy" for the ecosystem as whole: because people were actually using it as a medium of exchange, there was a dampening force opposing changes in value, and so while it was volatile compared to real currency, it was nothing like it is today.

Frankly, the fact that the takedown of the Silk Road didn't kill the entire market is still surprising to me. I'm not sure at what point the speculation bubble started, because I had well and proper lost interest at that point, but the idea that people willingly were/are pouring money into an system that has fundamentally broken its own economics is baffling to me. Transactions take too long and cost too much for it to be useful as a means of exchange, and if everybody is going through big exchanges than the anonymity factor doesn't exist either.

Long story short, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. If we could stop wasting the carbon footprint of a mid-sized country now to prop up an ecosystem of scams and baseless speculation now, that would be great.

[m348e912]

So many good points made in your post. It makes me think of what could have been if bitcoin remained a layer of exchange. I had high hopes for bitcoin cash, but even that has had it's own challenges. (although it does work pretty well)

[plsbenice34]

Silk Road had no impact because more markets opened up immediately, and Monero solved the anonymity/cost/time factor