The massive elephant in the room: I couldn't send $10 worth of BTC because the fees were higher than the amount.

That really means I can't buy anything under $10 with it, and then for anything over (by enough) I'd then have to pay the same again for the privilege. The idea of 'mass adoption' is absurd while that kind of thing is going on. So, really the only thing giving Bitcoin (in its current "core" incarnation) any value at all at the moment is blind hope that it will keep going up so you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it.

In fact the current situation is making 'mass adoption' increasingly less likely. Just today Steam has announced they are going to stop accepting Bitcoin because the fees are too high and the transactions take too long, and the price volatility is too nuts. Until this scaling/fees/transaction time issue is solved, it really is a house of cards built on nothing but the faith of true believers, and a lot of the original true believers are now maintaining that Bitcoin Cash (which has solved scaling, for now at least) is the real Bitcoin, and as crazy as it might sound now, it's still not totally out of the question that BTC could crash hard enough while BCH rises enough so that the prices overlap and that debate is reignited. At that point it would come down to which one most people accept.

Futures trading, and the weirdly paradoxical hope that institutional money will save the day (after all the constant bleeting about "fuck the banks" and all that) is not really the solution, because it doesn't actually mean people buying actual Bitcoins, just betting on it, and they can still bet on it going down, from the safety of an institution that will make money either way and doesn't especially care, in an environment dominated by people who are generally more likely to realise it's a bubble and think it's over-valued. So they can literally bet on it going down, help make that happen, and profit from it, while also being able to say "told you so".

Ironically, at this point I think the best hope of saving the "Bitcoin brand" is probably if BCH actually does take over, unless someone comes up with some other solution to the scaling problem that everyone involved globally can agree on (with no real rules on who that is, nor obligation to even stay involved, or interested at all), and after the shit storm that has gone on this year with all the forking, that seems doubtful really. Especially while there are so many better alternatives already available that can do everything it does better.

People hate the "tulip bulb" type analogies, to the extent I wonder if I should have put a trigger warning. But throwing the sorts of sums of money at Bitcoin as it currently operates that are being hurled at it right now is really totally insane, when there are so many real solid alternatives with real tangible realistic things that can be factored in to real tangible valuation. Not even getting into the environmental cost of using enough electricity to power a house for a week with every transaction.

It's this total pig-headed unwillingness to look these basic fundamental facts in the face (to paraphrase General Melchett) that is most bewildering, and the most blatant indication that it's quite probably the single most irrationally exuberant bubble in human history.

The sooner people let go of this evangelical perception that the Bitcoin brand must be preserved at all costs (literally) as the most important thing, the better. It's the technology it introduced that matters.