The prospect of Bitcoin application is still unclear, and two opposite extreme emotions are prevalent in the financial world

Recently, there are two opposite extreme emotions in the financial world regarding Bitcoin. Pessimists, represented by Mike Hearn, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, believe that the entire Bitcoin network has reached the brink of technical collapse, that Bitcoin cannot solve real problems, that transactions have dried up, and that this experiment has come to an end; optimists insist on being bullish, especially the good news that European banks have recently realized the first exchange of Bitcoin and British pounds , which has made supporters excited.

As of press time, Bitcoin has been rising for several consecutive days, with the price standing at 3,000 yuan, a new high in the past two months. However, from actual investigations, many once loyal players have long left the market for various reasons, and even some experts and scholars no longer pay attention to Bitcoin issues. Under the market conditions where the money-making effect is not good, the belief in decentralized virtual currency that players once believed in seems a bit fragile.

According to Zhang Shousong, CEO of Bitcoin trading platform BTCtrade, Bitcoin has bid farewell to extreme market conditions and entered a relatively stable price range. He said, "At present, RMB transactions account for 70% to 80% of global Bitcoin transactions, and China is still the main market for Bitcoin transactions. Due to the small price fluctuations recently, the trading volume has stabilized, and the platform's daily trading volume can reach hundreds of millions of yuan, which is about one-third of the peak period in 2013." Xu Mingxing, CEO of Bitcoin trading platform OKCoin, also said that compared with 2013, many users have indeed left, and in addition to Bitcoin business, the buying and selling of blockchain assets has also become the focus of platform development, which may also become the development direction of many trading platforms.

Zhang Shousong believes that the development of Bitcoin has brought more technical value, and more and more people are focusing on the blockchain. Because there is already a more advanced blockchain application platform than Bitcoin in the industry - Ethereum, and Bitcoin is the first P2P electronic currency system application built with blockchain technology, and its own currency and application value is still unclear. "As practitioners, we are only optimistic about Bitcoin's inherently reliable algorithms and encryption technology, and we are observing where Bitcoin will go with an exploratory eye." Zhang Shousong said.

Bitcoin expert and Yifan Capital partner Liu Xiao believes that Bitcoin's market performance depends entirely on the speculative demand brought about by event-driven factors, and has little correlation with transactions in the real economy. This shows that the online community's efforts to make Bitcoin a "currency" have never made any progress.

In addition, the speculative nature of Bitcoin itself also determines that it is difficult to carry out systematic development at the currency application level. Previously, sporadic attempts by related platforms mostly ended in failure, and no mature products and models appeared on the application side. And precisely because of the instability of the currency value, mature applications are difficult to develop in the Bitcoin community. "From this perspective, Bitcoin has always existed as a speculative product, and it will continue to exist in the future until all players lose confidence in it." Liu Xiao believes that the application of Bitcoin itself does not have development value, but as an encryption technology, the development of its underlying technology blockchain is more optimistic by all parties, and it may become a pleasant surprise.

Therefore, the problems with the existence and development of Bitcoin at this stage are mainly reflected in two aspects: First, at the technical level, the total amount control on the supply side makes Bitcoin highly speculative and the currency value is unstable, which affects its potential for daily transactions; second, at the application level, Bitcoin can only survive in the online world at present, and it will take some time to be accepted by more financial institutions. At present, the development prospects of Bitcoin are still unclear. "As a P2P trading technology, as long as there are still people using it, it is difficult to say that it will die. The prospects of Bitcoin as a currency have never been clear, but as a speculative product, there may still be room for survival." Liu Xiao said