Bitcoin Has No Real-World Utility, Says Lending Tree Economist Kapfidze

2020 is less than a couple of days old but the Bitcoin (BTC) critics are out with the same tired rhetoric as Lending Tree Economist Tendayi Kapfidze tells Yahoo Finance that the top-ranked crypto is a “pyramid scheme.”

Same FUD, Different Year

In a rehash of old anti-Bitcoin rhetoric, Kapfidze, chief economist at lending marketplace platform LendingTree, called Bitcoin a pyramid scheme. According to Kapfidze, BTC has no real-world utility despite being around for more than a decade.

Commenting further, Kapfidze argued:

“You only make money based on people who enter after you. It has no real utility in the world. They’ve been trying to create a utility for it for ten years now. It’s a solution in search of a problem and it still hasn’t found a problem to solve.”

Kapfidze’s comments are similar to the ‘greater fool’ arguments already espoused by other ‘nocoiners’ like economist Nouriel Roubini and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett. Despite these negative comments, Bitcoin’s stock has continued to rise over the past couple of years with many institutional adoption cases.

As reported by BTCManager, 2019 was a watershed year for Bitcoin with record trading volumes in the BTC futures arena for both the CME and Bakkt. The virtual currency scene has also grown exponentially with central banks and Wall Street banks looking to create their own crypto tokens.

Bitcoin is Best Investment of the Last Decade

Kapfidze’s argument flies in the face of established investment data which puts Bitcoin as the single best performing asset of the last decade. The top-ranked crypto constantly outstripped the S&P 500 and several other markets, growing about 9 million percent between 2009 and 2019.

To put Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in perspective, a $100 investment in BTC at the start of 2010 would be worth $9,000,000 today whereas, the same capital would be worth $208 in U.S. treasury bonds, $134 in gold, and $74 in oil.

Moving away from BTC as a speculative play, the top-ranked crypto has begun to see some use in the retail arena. Data from Coinmap shows that there are more than 15,800 retail outlets across the world that accept Bitcoin.

2019 transaction volume:

The entire Internet $4.1T

Bitcoin: $3.8T Bitcoin to exceed the Internet in 2020. BTW Bitcoin pertains to investment velocity while the Internet is payment velocity. Quite different, Bitcoin is currently a store of value, so investment is more important https://t.co/v6oSZM01NJ — Willy Woo (@woonomic) January 2, 2020

Excluding China, total internet money transactions via mainstream channels totaled $4.1 trillion in 2019. Total Bitcoin transactions for 2019 totaled $3.8 trillion, showing BTC isn’t far away from outstripping mainstream electronic money flow (discounting figures from China).