Bitcoin is in its post-usefulness phase, and that’s OK

BACK in 2013 as a reporter for The Business Times, I had the privilege of front-row seats to the early cryptocurrency gold rush in Singapore. It was a heady time. Early adopters honed in on Bitcoin, guided by an ineffable conviction that they were on to something big.

Then, even pioneers of the local crypto scene had struggled to articulate what exactly Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation was supposed to be. “It’s just something,” one of them had told me. “It’s not really a currency. It’s just something,” he added.

He hadn’t arrived at this pronouncement through lack of contemplation, but rather through an abundance of it. Think about Bitcoin hard enough, and you end up in a currency-versus-commodity mental ouroboros so perplexing that you need to go lie down.