To the moon or not?

We have the opinion of the trader. The famous trader Peter Brandt came to the conclusion that bitcoin repeats the same patterns on the chart as in 2015, after which its price increased about 100 times.

We can see a great future for the main cryptocurrency on the graph. Oh, how all of us want this to actually happen! But will it?

The latest spike to $5,000 is just another blip as cryptocurrencies stumble toward maturity.

Leonid Bershidsky said, the Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

What if, he's wrong? What if, another squelcher article by the Economist, launched something great by their dark and scary picture of faulty bitcoin and "hundreds of copycat cryptocurrencies"?

The article gives an overview of the crypto boom of 2017 and the ensuing failure, including an increase in the number of cryptocurrencies, the collapse of bitcoin from $20,000 to $3k and the failed IPO of Bitmain. Then there is a short comparison with tulip bulbs and the dot-com bubble.

The Economist goes further, talking about recent insights - for example, that very few bitcoin transactions are actually used for e-commerce, the number of speculations and the problem of fictitious transactions that inflate real volumes. He then raises the issue of scale, saying that cryptocurrencies are “too clumsy” to compete with popular payment systems.

The final part of the long list of problems includes bitcoin deflationary nature (which is often considered a feature in the crypto-sphere rather than a bug), as well as problems created by the irreversibility of transactions, including fraud and inaccessible reserves in the cold QuadrigaCX storage. Then the article seems to simply end with a paragraph about how the crypto community hopelessly thinks that the situation will improve.

This is a grim picture, a list of failures and flaws. And this is exactly the kind of article that should've cheered the crypto lovers. The article is so adorably one-sided. There is absolutely no balance. Nothing about emerging technologies, or investment in the blockchain, or about expanding real-life use opportunities, or about developing institutional solutions.

There's something similar between the phoenix and bitcoin - when someone solid says that bitcoin is dead - it magically revives. But there were no magic this time, as always.