Bitcoin's underlying value propostion is that it will, hopefully someday, provide an inexpensive, fast, anonymous way of transacting value over the internet, free from the prying eyes of the likes of the IRS and FBI. Speculation about its future utility has driven Bitcoin prices to $14,000 currently, and highs of over $19,000 last month.

The problem is; that future will never happen.
 

There will never be a day where consumers will buy groceries from Walmart using Bitcoin rather than dollars. Why? The chart above shows that over the past year, Bitcoin transaction costs (the amount of $$ you pay to send a bitcoin) has skyrocketed from $0.30 USD a year ago to $30.00 USD today. That means if you wanted to buy a $50 game on Steam last year it would have cost $50.30, and taken 10 minutes for the transaction to complete, but today it'll cost you $80, and it will take upwards of an hour for the transaction to complete. Bitcoin is currently a ridicilously impractical consumer payment method.

But why? Bitcoin is currently experiencing a huge transaction-bottleneck; this is because, by design, blocks in the blockchain are limited to 1MB in size, and a new block is only generated every 10 minutes. This creates a finite window for all transactions to fit into. And once that limit is reached, which it has, buyers and sells have to compete for the attention of miners by bidding on their time in the form of transaction fees. And that bidding has gotten fierce. Escalating transaction-costs over time are by design; miners were originally paid for the time in the form of newly generated bitcoins, but over time that bitcoin-reward decreases exponentially, to keep the number of Bitcoins limited at 21 million. Of those 21 million, 16 million have already been generated. Meaning miners are now paid for their time primarily in transaction fees rather than new free Bitcoins.

But the vast majority of Bitcoin owners don't care, because they're not using their Bitcoin to actually buy anything--they're simply speculating on future value appreciation. But after the speculative mania subsides, and Bitcoin millionaires try to cash in their earnings, the price of Bitcoin is going to crash, and it's going to stay there, for a while at least.

I strongly considered accepting Bitcoin as a payment-method for this site, it's far too impractical. I'm very bullish on the long term future of cryptocurrencies, but without major changes, Bitcoin as it is now is doomed as a consumer currency. Cryptocurrency usage will become wide-spread someday, but it won't be with Bitcoin; it'll be with a competitor that emerges from underneath Bitcoin's burst bubble. You can learn more about bitcoin here. If you want to buy bitcoin, read this article, if you want to backup your bitcoin wallet, read this.