I'd like to answer this in a more esoterical fashion that most of the responses (on Quora). To be sure, the trends analysis and fundamentals seem more germane, seem so much more practical and helpful. But when someone asks, "Isn’t Bitcoin dead? Isn't it going to finally crash?" I wonder if they are missing the point of its inception in 2008. And that IS when it was created. The first Bitcoin was sent in 2009, (creating the network, not the coin) but that fact detracts (in the public mind) from the relevance of the pivotal year in which it was conceived and coded, critical '08. Bitcoin was developed in response to the banking industry's manipulations (Libor, FED, Rothschilds...call it mammoth, concentrated, leading fiat - whatever you want)
But as long as there two human beings on the planet with access to a computer chip and a bit of wire, there will be Bitcoin and a market for it.
It is exquisitely that simple.
Allow me to iterate.
As long as there 2 or more entities with a single Satoshi to send between them, there will be Bitcoin or some version of it.
It seems an inscrutable answer to what you surely hoped would be the ever-pragmatic coder, trader, miner, libertarian espousing trends.
But extrapolate.
Markets aren’t bubbles.
You have an orange and I have a banana. Let’s trade.
Markets breathe. They go up and down, even waddle and fly.
But they don’t actually die.
They just slide into something that sounds a little different, or they soar until ‘we the market’ break up an entity so large we don’t want it over our heads anymore, threatening carnage.
Crypto enthusiasts talk about trustless. Permissionless. Immutable. Yada yada yada.
And that makes sense to a lot of people. But I find another perspective even easier to grasp.
Accounting.
Back in the cave-dwelling days, we had single entry accounting.
The Mama of the clan entered one record of how many berries her son ate versus her nephew.
It was revolutionary because the Mama thought ahead (and backwards and sideways) for the first time. She began budgeting and managing her berries and her brain took a leap as a result.
Then along came agriculture and a need for real trade. It wasn’t so much the plow that propelled us into humanity 2.0, but double entry accounting. Suddenly we had a need and the ability. Two entities recorded the transaction of berries traded, constituting a phenomenal leap in brain power and cultural advancement.
Enter Bitcoin, and triple entry accounting. (BTC did not introduce triple entry accounting, but I suspect in the fullness of time, history will give it credit) Who/what is the third entry? Cryptography, nothing but a bit of deciphering, to make it immutable, trustless, permissionless, and without an intermediary.
These characteristics within trade and accounting are unprecedented.
And the impact will be as revolutionary, mind-expanding and culturally advancing as agricultural was, perhaps more so.
If only a few hundred people understood the concept, it could possibly wither out through some catastrophic event.
But it is not 2011, it’s 2018 and there many, many thousands of us.
Triple entry accounting has entered the collective mind of humanity and is now intractable.
It will do no less than propel humanity forward as much as double entry accounting did during the onset of agriculture many millennia ago.
It is, however, yet to be determined our favourite forms of it.
In the future, they will look back, and this nascent stage will seem like papyrus. Computer archeologists will dig through discovered FBI computers in a trash heap orbiting the moon and attempt to piece together the identity of Nakamoto with stylometry.
But yeah. Bitcoin will recover from her current, what is it called? Slump, correction, bear trend?
I call it exhaling.
Wait for it….she’s about to gasp.