If you imagine crypto-currencies are the future this has not been a excellent 7 days. The price of Ethereum, Bitcoin's main rival and "the future of crypto" not so extended back, has lurched at any time reduced and is now 80% underneath its peak.
In the meantime, US regulators have acted towards companies included in crypto-currencies and original coin choices (ICOs) - techniques to create new coins.
But hope springs eternal, and in latest days equally a London artwork gallery and a Scottish lodge have contacted me about programs to let their customers to pay out with crypto-currencies.
So on this week's Tech Tent we discussion this question: has crypto-forex peaked or do its greatest days lie in advance?
We invited David Gerard, writer of Assault of the 50 Foot Blockchain, a quite sceptical just take on the crypto landscape, to debate with Christopher Shake, the director of that London gallery, The Home of Wonderful Art.
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The gallery's push launch had boasted that it was about to operate "the extremely first artwork exhibition only offered through crypto-forex".
By the time Mr Shake arrived in our studio that experienced changed somewhat - consumers would be encouraged to buy the 500 performs in the Oct exhibition in Bitcoin or a assortment of other electronic currencies but if they wanted to use good aged-fashioned bucks or pounds, this kind of payment would be acknowledged.
"Our main purpose is to help and encourage our artists," he says. But as a crypto-currency fanatic, he explains that there is also issue he needs to resolve: people sitting on massive crypto property aren't in a position to spend them.
"If a great deal of merchants do bounce on and acknowledge crypto-currencies, that will include confidence to the industry," he explains.
But David Gerard states issues are moving in the opposite route - fewer merchants are accepting crypto-currencies because they are so volatile and the promise of smooth value-totally free transactions has proved illusory.
He suggests many left during the 2017 Bitcoin bubble. "You couldn't believe in it for volatility, you couldn't believe in it simply because transactions have been slow and often failed to go via at all. It actually destroyed the use-case for the basic service provider acceptance of cryptos."
The Lender of EnglandImage copyrightGETTY Pictures
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The banking institution has not been rocked by crypto-currencies in the way some envisioned
He sums up his check out of the complete crypto marketplace: "It's not genuinely very interesting or shiny any much more."
But Christopher Shake sees it quite differently. He claims that absolutely everyone from Goldman Sachs to Amazon and Fb is now shifting into crypto-currencies - anything David Gerard states just just isn't the situation - and he thinks it is an notion whose time has occur.
"It is sticking around simply because it has price. It's sticking all around due to the fact it truly is a great engineering, and which is why establishments are acquiring into it."
But for all his reservations, David Gerard does not count on Bitcoin in specific to disappear in a hurry. "Bitcoin has put in its entire existence lurching from crisis to crisis, any of which would have killed a sane financial instrument," he claims. "But Bitcoin is a lot more of a sturdy cultist advocate thing for men and women who are into it."
His forecast is that crypto-forex will little by little become a lot more controlled and normalised - a fairly different eyesight from that of the early Bitcoin advocates, who noticed it smashing the program and generating central financial institutions and governments irrelevant.
Also on this programme, we seem at Apple's new overall health-centered Look at and ask regardless of whether medical professionals will be flooded with individuals worried about what its ECG keep track of is telling them. And we get two opposing sights on no matter whether the EU's proposed new copyright law is great for artists or will guide to a censored world wide web.
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