Months after the hype, practically no one is using Bitcoin to buy things

At the end of last year Bitcoin seemed about to eat the planet. In December it reached $ 19,000 in nominal value, and a few months earlier, in September, it had moved goods and services for more than 400 million dollars. The good, old days would not last forever: after half a year of progressive decline its price in the stock market remains relatively stable, but virtually no one is using the cryptocurrency to buy and sell things.

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69 million. The commercial peak of September was followed by a dramatic crisis that reduced the economic volume of Bitcoin to 195 million dollars at the beginning of this year. Since then, its market has shrunk little by little. Last month Bitcoin only served to exchange products or services worth 69 million dollars, according to a Bloomberg research: tiny figures compared to its commercial value a year ago, its market value today or the economic volume of foreign exchange , err, real.

Do you want my Bitcoin? If Bitcoin ever aspired to become a currency of daily use, today it is farther than ever from its objectives. Virtually no one uses Bitcoin. To a large extent, the problem is associated with its purely speculative nature: buying any product with Bitcoin during the crazy months of October, November and December of 2017 involved losing thousands of dollars in nominal value. Who would want a commercial with such a volatile currency?

Only to speculate. Hence the drastic reduction in market volume moved by Bitcoin during the past winter. Despite its stabilization, it has never recovered, partly due to the transaction costs associated with the currency, greater than those of conventional currencies. Interest in Bitcoin a few months ago was purely an investor, speculative, and those who bet on the currency did so in the hope of earning fast money (at the cost of borrowing and putting a lot of capital at risk in case it went wrong, as we saw).

Disinterest. The process is on a large scale: neither ordinary users want to buy a book with Bitcoin, nor do many of the establishments that offer them continue to accept the currency. Other large software development projects that aspired to enhance the implementation of the currency have frozen on the way: leading companies like Nasdaq showed an incipient interest in technology until, after months and the obvious complications of such a project arose. complex, they watched their partners pass by.

Your future. And now that? Bitcoin is a currency, so you need to behave as such. That is wrong with the speculative wave that put it in the mouth of half the world at the end of last year. Also with its instrumental character for money laundering or various types of scams. Some countries, like South Korea, are looking for ways to legally regulate the use of Bitcoin: a stable and reliable framework, hand in hand with the states, that lime their volatility would be a good starting point.

The problem, of course, is that the regulation and the role of any state organization is contrary to the philosophical definition of Bitcoin.