"The simple truth is that there are virtually no investment strategies that are worse ideas than cryptocurrencies. “Investing” in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is pure, unadulterated speculation. I put investing in parentheses because this is not investing, it is speculating. Cryptocurrencies are the “Tulipmania” of the 21st century."

"If currencies are fundamentally tribal, how can Bitcoin possibly become the “new gold standard”, as maximalists dream? Humans don’t take kindly to attempts by other tribes to eliminate their tribal symbols and impose those of another tribe. They have to be persuaded, not coerced. Currently, Bitcoin maximalists can’t even persuade other Bitcoiners to support their coin. The idea that they could persuade all the people of the world to throw away their tribal currencies and adopt their version of Bitcoin is laughable. When’s the next fork, by the way?"

"Bitcoin was never more than a vehicle for tax evaders and grifters to burn carbon in the hope of scoring a hot new Lambo. It represents all of our worst excesses, and it does so at a huge cost both to the people and our planet. Perhaps now that the investment has dwarfed the potential return, this collective hysteria will end. At least until the next one comes along."

"Bitcoin is literally worth nothing. Bitcoin has no chance of success because it’s worthless. It has nothing backing it but an illusion; no gold or silver or even a decree that it’s legal tender. It has no intrinsic value and no one needs it. Bitcoin doesn’t actually have any intrinsic value of any sort backing it – only vague assertions of its potential usefulness in the future. Your currency is only worth what other people believe it’s worth and I’ll present a few reasons why Bitcoin will never be generally agreed upon as something of worth."

"I’m afraid I am predicting it to go to zero value as it has no utility, it does not do anything and they intentionally are anti-scaling."

"Bitcoin is dead, it’s too fragmented, there’s tons of infighting I just don’t think it will last,” Finman told MarketWatch. “It may have a bull market or two left in it, but long-term, its dead."

"We’ve known bitcoin was dropping for a while, but the nails are really going in the coffin now. It costs $5,000 to make a bitcoin. But bitcoin is now only selling for $6,000. If this pattern keeps up, it’ll soon cost more to make bitcoin than bitcoins are actually worth, meaning nobody will bother making them anymore. Bitcoin is a colossal waste of energy that will soon be no more. Good riddance."

"Bitcoin also fails to meet the criteria of a currency. Its the price movements are too volatile to be a unit of account. The transaction capacity of the Blockchain is too limited for it to be a medium of exchange. Nor does it appear to be a good store of value. Since it produces no income, has limited scarcity value, and few people are willing to use Bitcoin as currency, it is even possible that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value."

"Cryptocurrencies are inherently a dumb idea. But aside from being a con, they also waste enormous amounts of energy in service of a pointless goal. The sooner Bitcoin crashes the better off the entire world will be."

"In my opinion, bitcoin is dead. It won’t go quietly, but the recent precipitous drop may be the beginning of its inevitable and inexorable death spiral. Or there could be a dead cat bounce. Either way, I see bitcoin as a dead man walking. Future generations may read about bitcoin in a finance textbook as a curiosity and wonder what all the fuss was about. There are still some die-hard adherents espousing the virtues of bitcoin, desperate to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Unfortunately for them, the end may not be pretty when it comes."

"Just one year has passed since bitcoin enthusiasts forecasted that the cryptocurrency would hit a price of $1 million. But that was then. With the price of bitcoin having fallen almost 80% from its peak, and now trading well-below the support level of $6,000, everyone is wondering where it goes from here. The answer is, a swift and painful drop to zero."

"The world’s premier cryptocurrency has bounced back from selloffs before but this time may be different. Regulators are cracking down and investors’ fear of losing everything is overtaking their fear of missing out. The route is a setback for people who hoped digital cash would challenge Visa and Mastercard. It vindicates Warren Buffet and others who have compared electronic currencies to a Ponzi scheme."

"The problem with bitcoin at the moment, despite Ohio, is just what its champions decry: It is not a government-controlled currency. And therefore, asks Merton, who is responsible for the value of our currency if tomorrow morning all the bitcoin screens go dark?"

"Bitcoin is down below $4,000./ BTC from nearly $20,000/BTC a year ago. Bitcoin is all about speculation. Don’t be tricked, buying bitcoin is a fool’s game."

"Bitcoin, while not officially a product of traditional Wall Street, is a pyramid scheme. A fraud. But it is best described as a “confidence game.” I’ve been calling it a “bitcon” for a long time. And now the pyramid seems to be collapsing because fewer and fewer people have confidence that the price of this inherently worthless “cryptocurrency” is going to continue to rise."

"Nothing on the Bitcoin label turned out to be in the bottle. As a means of payment, it is cumbersome, volatile and expensive. It has destroyed value rather than storing it. Its decentralized technology was sold to investors as being unique. It has been anything but."

"As history has proven on multiple occasions, most bubbles end with the majority of investors losing massive amounts of money as they hold and hope for the bubble to reflate. Regrettably, after bubbles pop, they can take decades to recover and “take out” the bubble price high, or, worst-case scenario, disappear. I think bitcoin will be a worst-case scenario situation."

"So much for Bitcoin, beloved of libertarians, drug dealers and, for a few golden years, the private sector currency that was set to displace the hated money of central banks. A week of sharp falls in its value has caused investors to question whether it is even viable as a financial asset, let alone a global currency that would one day replace the dollar or euro. Perhaps the next time you look at that Bitcoin ad, you should ask yourself: “What’s it worth in pet tortoise skeletons?” For everything else, there are euros."

"Where does Bitcoin go from here? Figuring out its price is more like going to Las Vegas and placing a bet. If you are good at reading market psychology, you might just make a profit trading in and out of the market. Just don’t hold it for the long term. It will continue to fall. Someday, it will be worth nothing."

"No serious institution would ever allow its transactions to be verified by an anonymous cartel operating from the shadows of the world’s authoritarian kleptocracies. So it is no surprise that whenever “blockchain” has been piloted in a traditional setting, it has either been thrown in the trash bin or turned into a private permissioned database that is nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet or a database with a misleading name."

"It is clear by now that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles…"

"Bitcoin has failed because it doesn’t solve a problem that enough people have — except for criminals and country dictators who want an unregulated, anonymous currency with which to do business out of the public eye."

"Crypto-assets are not money or currencies. So people wishing to invest or speculate in crypto-assets should do so without harbouring the unrealistic expectation that they would one day become money or currencies that can be used as a means of exchange."

"Whether or not cryptocurrncies recover–and I doubt they will–it is clear that their volatility make them unfit to serve as a general medium of exchange. However this lesson will likely be lost on the promoters of cryptocurrency."

"But as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino."

"Bitcoin will continue to fall, because “there’s just no value there,” former PayPal CEO Bill Harris told CNBC on Tuesday."

"Actually my political and economic tweets get far more attention than my bitcoin tweets. Interest in Bitcoin and crypto currencies in general is waining, hence the price declines."

"Bitcoin is great to transfer, but not for buying stuff. The reason it’s so easy to transfer is that you are transferring nothing. Actual value is harder to transfer."

"“Cryptocurrencies… Their value depends entirely on self-fulfilling expectations — which means that total collapse is a real possibility. If speculators were to have a collective moment of doubt, suddenly fearing that Bitcoins were worthless, well, Bitcoins would become worthless.”"

"It is a mathematical fact that when the price of bitcoins goes to zero, this zero-sum game will have completed its circle. Every dollar of profit that anyone made trading bitcoins will be matched by the losses of other bitcoin traders."

"Unless Bitcoin is able to become more efficient at mining, and more stable overall, it is likely to die. These higher mining costs and the fact that more retailers are failing to accept bitcoin as payment – as they are unable to convert it as it is too expensive – will mean the end of it."

"I use the term “worth” cautiously because bitcoin is really worth nothing, since it’s backed by nothing or no one. It’s a confidence game that has value only because people are convincing other people that it’s worth something. Got it! Ponzi scheme. Confidence game. Fraud."

"“[Bitcoin] is all based on the Great Fools Theory,” Belfort says in a recent YouTube video. “I know this better than anyone in the world. I’m not proud of that, but I do.” Belfort says bitcoin’s price surges are thanks only to a belief by buyers that there will continue to be ‘greater fools’ who they can sell the asset to at a higher price."

"My instinct is that these cryptocurrencies will disappear in a puff of smoke. I just hope too many people are not too damaged when it happens."

"Speculation, hype and mania led bitcoin to become arguably one of the largest investment bubbles in history."

"Bitcoin miners are using as much electricity as Switzerland, while the computing power needed to deal with bitcoin growth would eventually overwhelm all computers, the Bank of International Settlements said"

"The historical record of Bitcoin suggests its greatest leaps are made thanks to speculation, rather than to any real progress in utility or technology. Bitcoin’s rise to $19,000 from $6,500 at the end of 2017 was fueled by the belief that the price was only ever going to go up. There was no evidence of any increased adoption in the real world — if anything, the heuristics of Bitcoin trading called for hoarding, or HODLing, to sit on the gains."

"“Over the past few months, I’ve gotten this question more than any other,” wrote Davis. “As for bitcoin the currency? I see a decent probability that its price goes to zero.”"

"It’s a telling social phenomenon of late capitalism that we are willing to construct elaborate computer networks to conduct secure transactions with each other — and in the process torpedoing our hopes at a clean energy future."

"If you and I buy various cryptocurrencies, they're not going to multiply. There are not going to be a bunch of rabbits sitting there in front of us. They're just gonna sit there. And I gotta hope next time you get more excited after I've bought if from you and then I'll get more excited and buy it from you. We could sit in the house by ourselves and we could keep running up the price between us. But at the end of the time there's one Bitcoin sitting there and now we've gotta find somebody else. They come to an end."

"Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared."

"In my opinion, it’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen. In a pump-and-dump game, promoters “pump” up the price of a security creating a speculative frenzy, then “dump” some of their holdings at artificially high prices. And some cryptocurrencies are pure frauds."

"Blockchain hype is an essential part of the crypto-craze, and its fading is cause to expect the eventual crash. The reason is a relationship between a beguiling, but wrong, idea about technology, and the value it has injected back into crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Break that cycle, and you unspool the loop that’s spun itself into a boom."

"If the price of bitcoin falls below its cost of mining, it will quickly go to zero.The real concern is that if the price of bitcoin continues to fall, mining will become infeasible, and without enough participants providing the computing power to record the transactions, the transactions will be infeasible and bitcoin will become worthless."

"The rationale for these things is that there’s no central authority, which means no one can block or undo a transaction. And so far at least, it’s true that transactions aren’t blocked. But why do you need such a system? Because you’re doing a transaction that a central authority would otherwise block, like paying off a hitman or buying drugs…If that’s what you need money for, the cryptocurrencies are the only game in town. But if you don’t need to buy drugs or hitmen, the cryptocurrencies are vastly less efficient…if you want to buy something you don’t want people to know about, you can just use a pre-paid credit card. There’s still no need for Bitcoin."

"As the hype for cryptocurrencies continued to swell, so did the price. But this can only happen for so long, Barclays explains, much like the spread of an infection among a population."

"The greatest bubble in history is popping, according to Bank of America Corp. The cryptocurrency is tracking the downfalls of the other massive asset-price bubbles in history less than one year out from its record, analysts lead by Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett wrote in a note."

"Unfortunately, Bitcoin has totally failed to serve its purpose… The cryptocurrency is considered “digital gold,” and has regressive transaction fees that make smaller purchases more expensive compared to credit card…The point is that despite being created as a practical, superior alternative to current payment methods, Bitcoin is the inferior option with regressive transaction fees that render smaller purchases pointless, and longer processing times than credit cards."

"It’s a matter of when, not if, the Bitcoin bubble will pop, according to Allianz Global Investors. “In our view, its intrinsic value must be zero,” Stefan Hofrichter, the company’s head of global economics and strategy, wrote in a recent web post. “A bitcoin is a claim on nobody – in contrast to, for instance, sovereign bonds, equities or paper money – and it does not generate any income stream.”"

"They have no real value. The truth is that cryptocurrency advocates are misleading when they call these digital items a currency. Yes, technically they are currencies in that they can be used to buy some goods and services. But cryptocurrencies are fundamentally a speculation — people are buying hoping to sell later at a much higher price."

"In reality, blockchain is one of the most overhyped technologies ever. For starters, blockchains are less efficient than existing databases. When someone says they are running something on a blockchain, what they usually mean is that they are running one instance of a software application that is replicated across many other devices."

"That’s not the currency of the future—that’s a giant multi-level marketing scheme. Broadly defined, multi-level marketing schemes work by creating a structure where people are recruited and then incentivized to recruit new members…"

"Turnill noted cryptocurrencies’ high volatility, fragmented markets and lack of regulation. “We don’t see them becoming part of mainstream investment portfolios soon,” he said, adding that their volatility makes U.S. stock market turbulence during the financial crisis “almost look placid.”"

"Lesetja Kganyago, the incoming chair of the International Monetary Fund’s policy advisory committee, says cryptocurrencies pose no threat to the reserve currencies of the world."

"“When the history is written, cryptocurrencies will likely be described as one of the most brilliant scams in history,” Singer said in a letter to clients dated January, which was first reported by Business Insider."

"Bitcoin etc. are by no means currencies, because there is definitely no real value. These so-called cryptocurrencies are pure speculative objects."

"“While perhaps intended as an alternative payment system with no government involvement, it has become a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster,” he said. “The volatility of bitcoin renders it a poor means of payment and a crazy way to store value.”"

"Bitcoin is the “biggest bubble in human history” and this “mother of all bubbles” is finally crashing."

"Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. Combine that lack of a tether to reality with the very limited extent to which bitcoin is used for anything, and you have an asset whose price is almost purely speculative, and hence incredibly volatile."

"However, if it can’t be taxed, it can’t buy you a Mars Bar, and it isn’t backed by anything at all – and in fact is poorly viewed by certain authorities. It’s insulting to economists to call it an asset, an investment, or a currency."

"Though it once acted as the face of cryptocurrency and introduced the idea of distributed ledgers and digital assets, it’s time to usher in more promising technology."

"Since bitcoins are not useful as a medium of exchange, or desirable in themselves, their true value is zero."

"Slowing transaction times, skyrocketing fees, tighter rules and regulations, mining problems, loss of anonymity."

"Bitcoin in its current form, although there are planned upgrades to deal with capacity issues, we think that if the market basically turns its back on bitcoin this year it will really fall out of favour relative to other crypts that have much more utility and value add."

"Blockchain technology gives Bitcoin two crucial characteristics;— it can be exchanged peer-to-peer without the need for a trusted intermediary, and it lets transactions be anonymous. In both these ways, Bitcoin resembles physical cash. But whereas physical cash is the liability of a government, with a central bank controlling its value, Bitcoin is a liability of nobody. This is its fatal flaw as a currency. There’s nothing to stop its value from falling to zero."

"I think it’s a pyramid scheme. It makes no sense. I’m just surprised it isn’t even lower. There’s no fraudulent thing going on. It’s just a pyramid scheme. You’re betting that somebody is going to buy it. And some people have been right. The fundamentals make no sense."

"It is important to remember that Bitcoin is virtually impossible to value; it possesses no utility and has yet to be widely accepted as a currency, even by major e-commerce providers. This means sentiment is driving the price of Bitcoin, and any negative events that impact the confidence of investors could spark a full-blown flight, causing their values to collapse."

"The expectation that the price of Bitcoins will continue to rise in the distant future has a lot to do with the belief of many people that Bitcoin, and other “cryptocurrencies”, are the money of the future. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, the Bitcoin is an archaic currency like gold used to be."

"In terms of cryptocurrencies generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending. If I could buy a five-year put on every one of the cryptocurrencies, I'd be glad to do it, but I would never short a dime's worth."

"The central paradox of all these currencies is that we’re told they have eliminated the need for trust between humans and replaced it by mathematical guarantees; but all their tradeable value depends on blind faith and ignorance of computer code."

"But bitcoin and the like have the feel to me of beta-versions of the Model T Ford in the early days of motor cars. Fine for proof of concept, but too problem-laden to be useful to most of humanity."

"Having no clear fundamental value and largely unregulated markets, coupled with a storyline conducive to delusions of grandeur, makes this more than anything we can find in the history books the very essence of a bubble."

"It is hard to see bitcoin’s price surge as anything other than a bubble that will ultimately collapse. Bitcoin’s ostensible social function as an anonymous, nongovernmental means of payment carries big risks of its demise. And while blockchain, the platform that records bitcoin transactions, may well have staying power, there is no reason to believe it needs to rely on bitcoin for its success."