Crypto’s astonishing, if short-lived success as a speculative investment has only undermined its entirely more revolutionary function as a currency alternative.

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" has a lovely ring to it, too. Crypto fans suffer from precisely the same delusion as Communists: that anyone gives a crap about how things should be.

Smart as he, she, or it may have been, Satoshi didn't get people. If you invent a wannabe currency that cannot be issued in as much quantity as the things it can finance, it will either go unnoticed or it will appreciate and speculators will HODL it. That's the way of the world. Bitcoin could never become money, because money must be issuable for credit. Bitcoin can move fiat, but it cannot replace fiat.

But BTC doesn't even work well as a payment method. The thing holding it back in that role is the speed of the network. If I could buy BTC here and send them there, and my payee could unload them there, all while the price doesn't change significantly, BTC would be an excellent payment method. But it takes too damn long, and values change while the BTC are acquired from the exchange, sent to the recipient, and sold back to an exchange. Only criminals, who don't much care about some spillage in translation, will ignore that problem.

Don't blame speculators for that. Blame the kludgy, energy-wasting, chip-making capacity wasting, engineering skill wasting, proof-of-work mechanism. And blame anyone dumb enough to think Bitcoin was ever more than a proof-of-concept science project that might have some utility in some other field. Because, by Gresham's Hammer, it was never going to become money in any place worth living.