One possibility is that crypto is still too confusing and too difficult for normal people to use, especially during a war. Internet access is spotty in many parts of Ukraine, and reports have suggested that even the country’s elites are struggling to convert their assets into crypto.
Another possibility, popular among skeptics of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is that Bitcoin is still too volatile to be useful as a hedge against economic and political instability. .............................
“The Bitcoin and crypto communities have been selling a false narrative all these years that Bitcoin is supposed to be a safe haven from the traditional financial markets,” said Jimmy Nguyen, the president of the Bitcoin Association, a cryptocurrency trade group. (His group promotes a Bitcoin spinoff, Bitcoin SV, that sees itself as a more useful version of the cryptocurrency.)
Bitcoin is doomed, Mr. Nguyen argues, because it can be slow and expensive to process transactions, making it less useful for paying for things. “And so a lot of Bitcoin supporters have had to come up with this argument that it’s meant to be a reserve asset,” he said.
Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, floated a different theory. Bitcoin’s earliest and most vocal adopters, he said, tended to be libertarians who saw cryptocurrency as a kind of insurance policy against hyperinflation and government corruption. But the more recent price swings in the crypto markets attracted a surge of speculators who viewed Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mainly as investments, and cared less about their political implications.
“There’s a tremendous amount of rhetoric around Bitcoin in particular that suggests that it’s predominantly a means of escaping from the government-issued fiat currency system,” he said. “And yet most of the activity, according to basically every rigorous study that’s been done, is predominantly people speculating.” ...........................
Another possible explanation for Bitcoin’s underperformance, which was floated by Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg, is that chaos cuts both ways, and that the same events that could be seen as “good for Bitcoin” in the short term — inflation, sanctions, geopolitical conflict — could also be bad for Bitcoin over the long term, since they could draw the attention of regulators.
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