this month of November, the month when the value of a Bitcoin exceeded for the first time the threshold of 7000dollars. Which means for someone who bought Bitcoin a year ago that he will earn a return on investment over 800% !!!, at such a lucrative investment, many people are trying to jump on the Bitcoin train, which increases the demand and therefore inflates the value of Bitcoin. This behavior represents the key ingredients of a speculative bubble in particular the usefulness of Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency has not yet become a real means of exchange and is accepted only by a very limited number of traders, for an average daily volume not exceeding 500,000 dollars.
The craze for Bitcoin is not only explained by speculative motives. Enthusiasts who invest in Bitcoin, or other crypto-currencies like Etherum and Ripple, have the potential to become a payment medium for our daily transactions, if not to dethrone. outright classic currencies in a near horizon. Indeed, Bitcoin has had the merit of introducing several innovations, particularly the Blockchain technology. The Blockchain makes it possible to override the need for a central intermediary for the management of a transaction register for the latter to be shared with the nodes of the network in a decentralized manner. This register lists the circulation of money, a role traditionally held by a central bank. Because of this, it's the Blockchain that made it possible to have Bitcoins without a central organization. It is no longer necessary, therefore, to pay intermediaries who fulfill a fiduciary function. As for the supervision, it is shared by multiple network nodes, which considerably reduces the risk of fraudulent manipulation. Another great innovation introduced by crypto-currencies, specifically Ethereum, is smart contracts or Smart Contracts. A smart contract is a set of lines of code that runs automatically after one or a combination of conditions, such as the receipt of a payment or the arrival on a given deadline. The proper execution of these contracts is supervised by all the machines on the network, as is the case for the Blockchain, a method that ensures that the execution of the contracts will be respected. As a result, smart contracts can be used for example to send the access code to an apartment after receiving a transfer in a fully automated manner.
Given that Bitcoin is a large-scale experiment, the currency suffers from several limitations that hinder the adoption of e-money and the development of its use. The first limitation is the considerable energy cost required to execute the transactions, since each transaction requires the execution of complex algorithms by a network of energy-hungry machines. As an illustration, today, the power consumption of the Bitcoin platform is comparable to that of a country like Tunisia or Lebanon. The second limitation to the growth of Bitcoin is the reduced number of transactions that the network can process at the same time. This results in significant processing times to confirm a large volume of transactions, times that can reach the order of the day. Last but not least, a currency must be a store of value, which is not the case for Bitcoin today because of its high volatility. Bitcoin thus exposes currency holders to considerable risk and they would do much better if they moved their wealth to traditional currencies, where central banks control inflation very closely so that it is limited. . What is certain is that crypto-currencies have a way ahead of them before they can assert themselves as a full-fledged currency.