Everything novel will eventually end up as a speculative asset. In ages past, the amount of money available to be invested and the amount of investments (mostly) matched. But as the world grew more wealthy, suddenly there were many more people (even some middle class) who had surplus wealth to invest.

However, the number of investment opportunities either didn’t much grow, or grew modestly. And now there’s a mismatch.

This causes those with surplus wealth to chase ever-riskier opportunities, to fall for all sorts of scams, and to speculate in all sorts of assets… even to the detriment of markets.

The thing I find ironic is that this seems to be an actually valid criticism of capitalism, but one that I never hear spoken among the so-called and self-identified anti-capitalists.

As for Bitcoin, its development is now in control of those who seek to develop it only as a speculative asset. It can never become a currency alternative at this point, they’re actively steering it away from that original goal. The rest will fare little better, given that there is rising sentiment (especially among the left, but not only among them) to ban cryptocurrency outright over concerns (legitimate? I can’t say) that it will result in even more frightening climate change scenarios. We’re probably only years away from outright bans (though how they’d police that is difficult to say, might require crackdowns on general computing itself).