TL;DR: On 17 December 2017, the speculative price of BTC across exchanges reached $19,783.06. Two years later, the fever dream is still very much alive within certain circles, but claims about BTC being a store of value (SoV) have effectively been put to rest.

Two Years Ago Today, BTC Hit $19,783.06

Before Christmas that same year, BTC plummeted by nearly half, breaking below $11,000. The danger in citing speculative prices as proof of anything, other than a marker in time, is being dragged down a metrics rabbit hole. It’s something akin to arguing with a fervent religious believer who insists upon citing her revered, inspired text as evidence of the creed’s claims. Numbers mean whatever we want them to.

The near $20K number is significant to the reader only to the extent of when she bought-in. Should she’ve purchased BTC at $1.00, all is well, and the price run-up was little more than a nice distraction and, if she was smart, a chance to take some profits and enjoy her 2017 end-of-year festivities.

Psychologically, however, high-highs and resulting low-lows tell a story, one dying for context. Markets, even those universally acknowledged as illiquid and irrational as crypto, are signaling devices. That 2017 price mania attracted attention, yielded media coverage (some very positive or at least not negative), and spawned a wave of curious folk into the space. What an incredible opportunity to explode the decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash revolution.

Store of Value

The price shock also helped justify a narrative change among developers who controlled access to the BTC project. As more regular people flocked to the crypto ecosystem spurred by all the surrounding fuss, they immediately noticed wait times, long lags in processing transactions, incredibly high fees in order to move or use their BTC. Rather than admit key BTC dev decisions were handicapping users’ experiences, it was the perfect moment to insist such was a feature, not a bug, and in-line with the true nature of BTC: digital gold, a store of value, meant to be held close and not used at all.

For those not technically inclined, the new dramatic shift from peer-to-peer electronic cash toward an SoV made a lot of sense. Look, BTC is a horrible payment system! You’d be nuts to use your BTC when it’s skyrocketing in value! HODL! Digital gold!

And then it wasn’t. A lot. Quickly.

The bait of price, the lure of justifying an obviously broken protocol that couldn’t scale, meant those who bought in late 2017 never fully recovered. Headlines screamed about entire families selling all they owned to buy more BTC, sure it was only headed toward greater price highs. That idea’s death was painful, but just as many ecosystem veterans would call them suckers, and maybe deservedly so.

They’re Gone, and They’re Not Coming Back

Those “new” people are gone, and they’re not coming back. BTC brought them to decentralized money and its promise, and BTC devs drove them away through SoV nonsense and horrible user experience. When they left, they took that knowledge and attempted to warn others about avoiding similar fates, lumping all of cryptocurrency into the same category … as one would with Coke to soda, Kleenex to tissue, Nike to shoes. Bitcoin is a scam, a Ponzi, a Pyramid. Not only does it suck as a payment system, beyond useless, it’s also not anything like a store of value.

Marketing folks understand this scenario well. While devs and tech nerds fought over this or that obscure line of code, marketers instantly knew BTC would not be able to recover in any real, longer-term sense. The adage is close to why so many businesspeople flip out when they get a bad review on Yelp or why managers and higher-ups in a company go the extra mile to please a disgruntled customer: sphere of influence. One passionate, scorned person impacts dozens of others’ opinions. Now imagine that number at scale. Suddenly, the BTC crash makes much, much more sense.

The quick response from BTC enthusiasts is, well, peer-to-peer electronic cash like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) ate it much harder in terms of price, as did other cryptos. Fair enough. But how much of the use case, the BCH narrative, its reason for existing, hovered around Number Go Up? Store of value? An honest person would answer near zero. Price isn’t unimportant, of course, but it’s not peer-to-peer electronic cash’s focus. Utility is. Adoption is. Positive user experience is. Unfortunately, the network effect of BTC’s reach brought a generation-in under a digital gold mania, and turned them off just the same, quicker even. Every project suffered, suffers, because of it. That’s the lasting lesson of 17 December 2017: users and utility drive value long term, not hype, not fever dreams.

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DYOR: CoinSpice is your home for just spicy crypto things. We’re not affiliated with any cryptocurrency project or token. Each published piece is intended for information purposes only, not investment advice and not in the hope of impacting speculative markets. There are plenty of trading sites and coin-specific advocacy journals out there, we’re neither. CoinSpice strives for rigorous accuracy in our reporting. Information presented here is contingent usually on a host of factors, and the ecosystem moves fast — prices change, projects change, and at warp speed. Do your own research.

DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.