And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed?
To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaking the economic and security models Satoshi had set forth. The bitcoin thereafter has been a soulness Frankenstein animated by a mixture of ego, greed, and hubris. I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it.
As for the wider field of blockchain/DLT, it bears an uncanny parallel to the early days of nuclear physics when radioactivity was first discovered by the Curies: The science behind it was be sound, yet any benefit to mankind was overshadowed by the cottage industry selling radioactive snake oil for a long time before the mania died down. And people died when basic precautious were not taken.
It may work down the road and it may not, but right now all I see is woo in every direction.
So annoying to see triumphant declarations of victory of bitcoin, based solely on the price increasing.
Speaking as a bitcoin owner and proponent, there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform (which I happen to believe is bitcoin's primary use case). This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput, which has predictably suffered as a result of increased mainstream interest (even with practically no merchant adoption).
The narrative has shifted recently that bitcoin is now a 'settlement layer', only that makes the situation even worse, because there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs.
So yeah, I don't share in the exhilaration over $4000+ bitcoins.
That is completely false. Development of Lightning Network and other solutions by multiple teams has been steady and robust. To cite a few working on LN:
* https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning