Excellent article. The Internet has provided many wonderful things, but it's also industrialized mendacity. I believe all of these crypto-currencies, NFT's, etc., exist almost entirely to separate the rubes from their money. Who, other than fentanyl dealers and extortionists, really needs or wants an exchange medium that doesn't have a trusted middleman?

It's my opinion that Bitcoin must fail, but I think it's an opinion that is just short of being a theorem.

It's a fact that every dollar that walks out of the crypto world is a dollar plus change that has to be "invested" by someone. That's just the way it works. Nothing can rise in value forever--it must have a peak value at some point. Maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. That's another fact. And as long as it's traded, the relentless monotonic increase in aggregate cost of mining must eventually exceed any value you care to name for the maximum price of a Bitcoin. Another fact. And it's almost a fact, given human experience, that at some point after it peaks, people will recognize that it was the peak, and not an up and down jiggle, and it will become a permanently unattractive investment.

After that, it must ratchet down in value, and it eventually has to ratchet down to below the cost of processing. Therefore, every dollar that has been spent for bitcoin when the price maxes out must eventually be lost by someone. It's not like the stock market, or bonds, where something way down there is generating value. Someone has to lose all that money that's walking away in dollars!