If you think crypto-currencies are the long term this has not been a great week. The value of Ethereum, Bitcoin's primary rival and "the foreseeable future of crypto" not so long back, has lurched at any time reduce and is now 80% below its peak.
Meanwhile, US regulators have acted from firms involved in crypto-currencies and original coin offerings (ICOs) - schemes to create new cash.
But hope springs eternal, and in latest days equally a London art gallery and a Scottish hotel have contacted me about ideas to enable their consumers to pay with crypto-currencies.
So on this week's Tech Tent we debate this query: has crypto-currency peaked or do its ideal times lie forward?
We invited David Gerard, writer of Assault of the 50 Foot Blockchain, a very sceptical take on the crypto landscape, to discussion with Christopher Shake, the director of that London gallery, The Property of Wonderful Artwork.
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The gallery's press launch had boasted that it was about to operate "the very first artwork exhibition only available by means of crypto-forex".
By the time Mr Shake arrived in our studio that had modified a bit - consumers would be encouraged to purchase the five hundred performs in the Oct exhibition in Bitcoin or a selection of other digital currencies but if they needed to use good previous-fashioned dollars or lbs, such payment would be accepted.
"Our main goal is to support and encourage our artists," he says. But as a crypto-forex fanatic, he explains that there is also dilemma he desires to remedy: individuals sitting on large crypto property usually are not capable to spend them.
"If a great deal of retailers do soar on and take crypto-currencies, that will add self confidence to the marketplace," he describes.
But David Gerard suggests things are relocating in the opposite path - fewer merchants are accepting crypto-currencies simply because they are so volatile and the promise of clean value-totally free transactions has proved illusory.
He suggests many remaining for the duration of the 2017 Bitcoin bubble. "You couldn't have faith in it for volatility, you couldn't trust it simply because transactions were slow and often did not go through at all. It actually ruined the use-circumstance for the basic merchant acceptance of cryptos."
The Financial institution of EnglandImage copyrightGETTY Pictures
Impression caption
The banking establishment has not been rocked by crypto-currencies in the way some anticipated
He sums up his see of the complete crypto market: "It truly is not genuinely extremely intriguing or shiny any much more."
But Christopher Shake sees it extremely otherwise. He claims that absolutely everyone from Goldman Sachs to Amazon and Facebook is now shifting into crypto-currencies - something David Gerard states just just isn't the scenario - and he thinks it is an concept whose time has arrive.
"It is sticking all around simply because it has price. It truly is sticking around simply because it is a excellent technologies, and which is why establishments are obtaining into it."
But for all his reservations, David Gerard does not count on Bitcoin in particular to vanish in a hurry. "Bitcoin has put in its complete existence lurching from disaster to crisis, any of which would have killed a sane fiscal instrument," he claims. "But Bitcoin is far more of a sturdy cultist advocate issue for people who are into it."
His forecast is that crypto-currency will slowly grow to be a lot more regulated and normalised - a instead different eyesight from that of the early Bitcoin advocates, who observed it smashing the technique and creating central financial institutions and governments irrelevant.
Also on this programme, we search at Apple's new wellness-centered Watch and question no matter whether medical professionals will be flooded with patients worried about what its ECG check is telling them. And we get two opposing views on whether or not the EU's proposed new copyright legislation is great for artists or will guide to a censored web.
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