I think dropping to zero is inevitable for the following reasons. Its value is almost entirely fueled by the hope/expectation that whatever you paid, the market will rise and you’ll make more. Clearly that can’t go on forever — the value can’t be infinite. The thing is, BC is not a form of money — it’s a form of cash. There’s a difference. Real money is the expression of billions of debts, obligations, investments, etc. It has enormous inertia, i.e., resistance to wild fluctuations in value, because each dollar is just the exposed tip of a huge network of such interactions all of which have randomly spaced out dates that prevent rapid motion except in weird circumstances. Bitcoin is in theory more like digital gold. In fact, it’s just a betting pool based on the hope you can sell for more than you paid. If it can’t go to infinity, at some point, it has to peak (you don’t know when that is except in hindsight) and after that, after it doesn’t rise for long enough, people lose hope that it will rise, and start selling. One thing people forget is that it costs a huge amount of money to mine new coins. The value of a coin is still a significant multiple of that cost, but the gap must close. That cost does not go down just because the value of a coin does — it always goes up (at least in terms of number of cycles.) So when the price going down crosses the mining cost going up, the miners will be paying to do the validation. That definitely can’t last. The big boys might decide to subsidize mining for a little while while they do some last minute cashing out, or in hope that the two lines will cross in the other direction again, but long term, it must dies. How can it not eventually fail? IMO, the only reason that it hasn’t imploded yet is that Wall Street saw an opportunity and is flogging it to the hoi polloi, trying to milk a profit out of people putting their retirement funds and savings into it. Literally every dollar someone walks away with must be lost by someone in the swelling ranks of the unsophisticated investors who want in because they missed the last few bubbles.