After the Bust, Are Bitcoins More Like Tulip Mania or the Internet?

As the proponents of the tulip bulb version of Bitcoin will tell you, most of the transactions today are speculative: people buying and selling Bitcoin in the hope that it will be worth more in the future. No one can force Bitcoin users to register their identity, so Chainalysis and other firms are in the dark about many transactions. Chainalysis estimates that last year, companies handling Bitcoin payments accounted for 0.3 percent of all Bitcoin transactions, or $2.4 billion

This is a healthy dose of apparently legal commerce, but it was not a good sign for Bitcoin that it was shrinking for most of last year when the price of Bitcoin was going down, according to Chainalysis data.

Source: www.nytimes.com