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| Bitcoin does not seem like a very good investment to me. |
It is starting to look like Bitcoin is dead or soon will be. And this time I don't think there is enough public goodwill remaining for it to come back. Bitcoin has always been the Mos Eisley Spaceport of currencies. You will not find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy anywhere else in your portfolios. First, you had the Mt. Gox scandals (yes, I use the plural). Things just kept going wrong at Mt. Gox.
Then you had the shutdown of Silk Road, which had become an underground exchange for drugs, money laundering, and murder. Bitcoin was once again drawn into the story, and investors rightly asked if this wasn't a shady system after all. But Bitcoin recovered and moved on. The fact it was able to absorb such devastating body blows in public trust suggested to many that maybe this was a system worth investing in after all.
But the ugly truth about Bitcoin has finally surfaced. The system is broken and being kept so by Chinese "miners" and 3 core developers who have effectively shut down all public discussion about how to handle the systemic failures of Bitcoin.
In a nutshell, Bitcoin is running out of memory for its immutable transaction log. When the system can no longer record transactions no one will be able to use their Bitcoin. They won't even be able to withdraw Bitcoin from their wallets. Your money is just frozen in time.
People who are just playing with the Bitcoin system may not care much but some investors have millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins. You can't spend that money if Bitcoin's software cannot write any more transactions.
Technical solutions have been put forward but the Bitcoin community has come to the awful realization that what was intended to be a true crowd-managed currency is, in fact, controlled by fewer than 10 people who have all the power. And these people are behaving like brutal dictators, shutting down all opposition to their policies.
They will in the end destroy the very currency they are trying to control. But the real losers will be the people who blindly trusted a decentralized system to stay decentralized. When you put money into the mix every system becomes corruptible.
