Money Talks
The Bitcoin Dream Is Dead
Bitcoin’s recent 25% plunge illustrates why it will never be a true currency
On May 22, 2010, a Bitcoin developer named Laszlo Hanyecz bought what may have been the most expensive meal in human history when he paid someone 10,000 Bitcoins to pick up and deliver him two pizzas from Papa John’s. Given that one Bitcoin is now worth more than $30,000, those pizzas cost, in retrospect, somewhere north of $300 million.
Nowadays, of course, no one would think of shelling out Bitcoin for something as mundane as a pizza without thinking first about how much money they might be giving up in the future. In the years since Hanyecz’s splurge, Bitcoin has gone from being an interesting experiment in decentralized finance to being the best-performing asset of the decade, rising more than 10,000,000% since 2010 and jumping 220% last year alone. There’s a Bitcoin ticker on every finance website. Legendary investors like Paul Tudor-Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, and Bill Miller speak approvingly of its prospects, and companies like Square and MicroStrategy have invested their corporate cash into Bitcoin. Despite being extraordinarily risky and volatile — as evidenced by the 25% drop it took between last Friday and Monday afternoon — Bitcoin has, in some sense, been admitted to the club and is now…
