Forbes columnist: Bitcoin is finished

Bitcoin is finished, or at least it looks like it is about to be finished. This is the conclusion made by Forbes columnist and macroeconomic analyst Tim Worstall in a short commentary article published on the Forbes official website on June 20, 2011 [1].

Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time, experienced a price crash. Within a few minutes, the price of Bitcoin dropped from $17 to a few pennies. A penny is one hundredth of a dollar. In other words, the price of Bitcoin on the exchange dropped by 99% in almost an instant.

Mt. Gox exchange CEO Mark Karpleles quickly took the site offline and said he would roll back suspicious transactions. The problem was pointed to several user accounts that were suspected to have had their passwords compromised by hackers.

As of the time of writing, the investigation has revealed a few more details, with around 60,000 user accounts allegedly compromised and hashed passwords breached.

So Tim Worstall asserted that the Bitcoin currency experiment is over. For a currency, medium of exchange, value storage, liquidity, and security are all extremely important properties. So far, humans have used countless strange things as currency, from copper pieces to shells, from salt to gold and silver, and even a piece of paper with the portrait of a deceased president... None of them is perfect. However, Bitcoin, which does not have the above properties, will definitely not last long.

The Mt. Gox theft showed that Bitcoin is not safe. It has no liquidity, is not a store of value, and its price often collapses, so it cannot serve as a good medium of exchange. Who would accept Bitcoin as payment?

Bitcoin advocates say that at least Bitcoin can give us anonymity. However, from copper to shells, from salt to gold and silver, and even a piece of paper with the portrait of a deceased president printed on it, which one is not anonymous?

Tim Worstall finally said that it is difficult to say where Bitcoin is going.

Today, although the price of Bitcoin has climbed to $47,000, the interesting thing is that there are still many people who question Bitcoin from the same perspective as Tim Worstall.

Earlier this year, the FBI announced that a pair of American thieves, a man and a woman, were arrested. The Bitcoin cold wallet where they stored the stolen money was "cracked" by the FBI and the Bitcoins were transferred away. A large number of people were stunned and rumors spread that Bitcoin's encryption technology could not stop the FBI's methods.

Later the truth came out. It turned out that the two thieves were so careless that they stored the private key directly on the cloud disk, which was easily obtained by the FBI.

Regarding this matter, Liu Jiaolian’s official account also had an article at the time titled "The male and female thieves were both arrested, and nearly 95,000 bitcoins were recovered" (2022/2/10). Readers who are interested in some details can take a look at it.

Some time ago, many Russian accounts were frozen or even confiscated by some cryptocurrency exchanges in Europe and the United States. This caused some domestic big Vs who love financial conspiracy theories to be inexplicably surprised. Many people even asserted that Bitcoin is a tool controlled by the US government to harvest the world, and even said that Bitcoin is a new weapon of currency war invented by the US Central Intelligence Agency to attack other countries' financial markets.

Ignorance, shamelessness, incompetence. They can't even distinguish the security of Bitcoin itself from the security of the centralized exchanges that host Bitcoin. You can't trust a single word from these "three-no" critics.

References:

- [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/20/so-thats-the-end-of-bitcoin-then/?sh=6a88eeb85d71