Bitcoin has clearly failed in an 'exchange' role as evidenced by still not needing to fiddle with the 7 tps transaction rate (1MB block size) and not being on a trajectory to need to do so any time soon. The reason for this is abundantly clear and I've been saying so for years: Bitcoin is simply not competitive in this role.
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The pipe-dream of using Bitcoin as an exchange currency has unsurprisingly sucked in a school of intellectual herring, but more surprisingly also a bunch of VC predator food-chain class who I would have not expected to be such dullards. ...
Lemme just follow up on that briefly for the benefit of those here who are not so mentally adroit (e.g., cypherdoc, justusranvier, etc.)
I wrote that after reading about the BitPay layoffs. This is an indicator that it's starting to dawn on the VC types that they've been shucked by us geeks (and the last half year of charts indicates something similar.) It's probably not monetary loss which stings as much as being ridiculed by their peers.
Anyway, I read this as a strong alignment of the tea leaves showing that we may be in for more hard times for a while. The low hanging fruit has been plucked. It was fun, but now it's time to knuckle down and let Bitcoin build on it's true strength as a solid reserve currency. I just hope it's still possible. If it is it will be a monster pay-day for us hodlers. If it's not, oh well...it was a fun ride.