Is bitcoin going mainstream?

The cryptocurrency suffers from all the problems it has always had and that may never change. But digital currencies more broadly may be about to take off. Simon Wilson reports

Bitcoin © Getty Images
Bitcoin is on a rising trend that may get an extra lift from a “halvening” © Getty
(Image credit: Bitcoin © Getty Images)

How is bitcoin getting on?

By its own standards, bitcoin has achieved a certain stability, in that its price in recent weeks – in the range of $7,000 to $9,000 – is in the same ball park as it was 12 months ago. Bitcoin remains highly volatile: its price all but halved between mid-February and mid-March (as financial markets took fright at Covid-19), before running back up again strongly since then. It remains primarily a tool for speculators, rather than a means of exchange or store of value. Yet the cryptocurrency has nevertheless defied predictions – following the popped bubble of 2017 – that it would collapse, or become near-worthless. The crash was spectacular and several other cryptocurrencies fell even more steeply (over 90% falls). But one bitcoin remains around half the value of the all-time peak (near $20,000) in December 2017. It bottomed out a year later, at around $3,200 – and in the year and a half since then it’s been on a rising trend, which bitcoin boosters hope will get an extra lift from the imminent “bitcoin halving”.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.