MyChargeBack, a pioneer provider of forensic cryptocurrency investigations, has published a White Paper that poses the potentially explosive question of whether Bitcoin is really here to stay. Drawing parallels between the hype surrounding Bitcoin before the onset of crypto winter and the launch of the ill-fated Edsel by the Ford Motor Company over 65 years ago, the White Paper suggests that the fate of the world’s first digital currency faces a series of challenges that may compromise its viability.
Entitled “Is Bitcoin a Digital Edsel?,” the MyChargeBack White Paper was written by Evan Spicer, the company’s Director of Cryptocurrency Investigations. In it, Spicer argues that Bitcoin faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles that it has to overcome if it is avoid becoming a niche collector’s item, like the Edsel is today. Those obstacles are Bitcoin’s inherent lack of intrinsic value, its blockchain’s huge carbon footprint and competition posed by the coming introduction of Central Bank Distributed Currencies (CBDCs).
“Just to be clear, we’re not yet writing Bitcoin’s obituary, just that there are similarities between the public obsession with Bitcoin before its crash, when millions of people were buying it up thinking they’d become billionaires overnight, and the anticipation that preceded the Edsel, which was lauded as “the car of the future” when it was introduced in 1957,” he explains. “In both cases, all of a sudden, their bubbles burst, the digital one in 2022, when Bitcoin lost 65% of its value, and the automotive one in 1959 after Ford had already lost the equivalent of $2.5 billion in today’s dollars and had no option left other than to kill the Edsel off,” he adds. “The lesson of the Edsel was that it was overhyped, it underdelivered and it couldn’t adapt before time ran out,” Spicer concludes. “Without planning ahead, the same may eventually be said about Bitcoin, too.”
The “Is Bitcoin a Digital Edsel?” White Paper can be downloaded from the MyChargeBack website.
