Bitcoin the Child

Years on Bitcoin has proved itself to be the safest & stable alternative to the banking system.
However, Bitcoin entrepreneurs have seriously dropped the ball and fail to offer meaningful services after 11 years.
But this is not entirely their own fault as the crackdown on Bitcoin by governments closely aligned with the banking sector has been severe.
And various attacks on the system have revealed a ''weakness'' in the speed of the transactions with very large volumes, something that is being addressed with a new network layer called the Lightning network.
Even as other competing payment systems are allowed to flourish, like Paypal and mobile services, cryptocurrencies have somehow been singled out as an enemy of the state.
We have seen roundups by police and outright censorship of information by Google and Facebook.
Unless the crypto community addresses this unfair treatment by governments and corporations, this treatment will continue and cryptocurrencies will remain a minor niche market for a long time to come. And the promise of profiting from short-term price speculations goes out the window.
The competing payment systems will make sure that the suppression of cryptocurrencies continues, purely motivated by their own bottom lines.
The crackdown on cryptocurrencies is now also aided by a media campaign hailing blockchain itself, something that was introduced with Bitcoin, as the new savior technology, even though why it is supposed to be so cannot be properly explained. Cryptocurrency as a technology is to be ignored as some sort of freak early outgrowth of blockchain technology if you believe all the trendy Silicon Valley media.
Put on top of this the price manipulations, because the price of cryptocurrencies is still almost exclusively determined by trading on Forex and stock type exchanges, trading has long since been automated and has had a long history of manipulations of every kind. Price manipulation technologies are very mature.

Bitcoin is robust, there is no doubt about that, but will this embattled teenager be mature enough to emerge from its adolescence?
Maybe this is the year Bitcoin will pull up its pants,

or it will stay around the hip,
meaning comfortable with hanging lower.