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Bitcoin hides a reality: almost nobody uses the currency

(Bloomberg) - Bitcoin has a problem that few people comment on amid the renewed exuberance of the recent price hike.
Almost no one is using the world's largest trading cryptomoeda, except to speculate. Data from Chainalysis, a New York-based blockchain consultancy, show that only 1.3 percent of economic transactions came from traders in the first four months of 2019, with little variation from the highs and lows of the previous two years.
Companies like AT & T now allow customers to pay for crypto bills, but the problem is that few speculators want to use digital coins to pay for mobile services, when the price of the digital asset can rise another 50% in a matter of weeks. This is the main dilemma of the criptomoeda: Bitcoin needs euphoria to attract large-scale users and be considered a viable electronic alternative to money. However, currency has developed a culture of "hodlers", those who prefer to accumulate rather than spend.
"Bitcoin's economic activity continues to be dominated by currency trading," Kim Grauer, senior economist at Chainalysis, said in an e-mail. "This suggests that Bitcoin's main use remains speculative, and mainstream use for daily purchases is not yet a reality."
Bitcoin's share has more than doubled since January to nearly $ 9,000. The original cryptomoeda shot 1,400%, to nearly $ 20,000 in 2017, but fell more than 70% last year.
Merchant transactions with Bitcoin are still below the peak at the end of 2017, when the segment accounted for 1.5% of the total cryptomeo activity during the apex of the bubble. The use of digital currency in retail outlets fell to 0.9% last year as Bitcoin's price plummeted before starting to recover in 2019, according to Chainalysis. Olga Kharif