Yeah, a colleague who I consider intellectually much smarter than myself asked me recently about why I think BTC goes up at the moment. He seemed stuck on the Trump effect. I told him, for me, BTC was bound to go up. There is no other reason. At most, Trump was a catalyst in the recent uptick, but we're just at that bullish point in the cycle. Any good news would have had such effect. And in a bear market, any good news would have had no effect. It's annoying/amusing when each little change in price triggers media to try to find correlation with something that happened in the real world. Anyhow, I stopped him short, as I don't like talking about Bitcoin in the NGU context :)

Bitcoin is not being used or perceived as a P2P payments protocol.

It has become increasingly a speculative commodity increasingly captured and controlled by institutional bankers and brokers.

Most Bitcoin appear in blissful ignorance of this - perhaps due to the windfall speculative gains they have enjoyed so far.

But without MoE P2P payments use and utility Bitcoin is a FAILED revolution. It fails to confront and present an alternative to the fiat hegemony over MoE. It is relegated to being a relatively harmless speculative plaything- held increasingly in the custody of bankers and their nominees.