Bitcoin Hits Record High Above $110,000

Bitcoin Surpasses $110,000 and Reignites Debate on Its True Value

Bitcoin reached a new all-time high above $110,000, driven by US Senate pogre on stablecoin regulation and an administration perceived as more favorable to the sector. The 2.01% single-session rise to $109,069.35 revived a long-standing question: is it a store of value or a speculative bubble? This discussion was further fueled by a widespread power outage that left parts of the country without electricity, rendering card payments, Bizum, and banking apps unusable.

What Peine to Bitcoin's Price

The immediate trigger was political. The US Senate voted to advance a bill regulating stablecoins, with support from some Democrats, leading markets to interpret the regulatory environment as less hostile. Bitcoin rose 2.01% to $109,069.35, surpassing $110,000 in subsequent hours. This is not an isolated event: analysts note the asset has been trading for 16 years, accumulating record highs while fiat currency loses purchasing power.

Euphoria has its downside. Some analysts argue Bitcoin is poorly designed for daily payments, serving primarily as a store of value rather than a medium of exchange. Others label it a speculative asset with no intrinsic value. The debate is old, but each record reopens it with greater intensity.

The Outage That Tested the Narrative

The most cited incident was a general power blackout. For several hours, card payments, Bizum, banking apps, and PayPal failed. Only cash worked. This created a paradox: Bitcoin critics argued that if the power goes out, Bitcoin becomes useless. The counter-argument was decisive: no digital payment system worked, and Bitcoin is not currently used as a generalized payment method, but as a store of value. Its function as a reserve was never compromised; users simply couldn't check their balances.

Irony trinc in another message: while fiat money loses value, Bitcoin continues to break records. The lingering uncomfortable question remains: if the traditional financial system is more vulnerable to blackouts than a decentralized network, why does the debate focus on Bitcoin's electricity dependency?

Is Bitcoin a Hedge Against Inflation?

This is the core of the disagreement. One school of thought defends Bitcoin as digital gold: a finite resource with limited supply that protects against uncontrolled money printing by central banks. This argument rests on uncomfortable data: current median wages, converted to euros from over a decade ago, are significantly lower, even considering official inflation figures that many view as optimistic.

The objection is equally strong. If Wi-Fi fails, users lose access to their bitcoins, whereas bank account holders can visit a physical branch. The rebuttal suggests that in a total blackout scenario, paper money buys nothing either, forcing reliance on gold, silver, jewelry, antibiotics, or diesel. The debate oscillates between short-term technological issues and long-term monetary implications.

Technical Issues No One Disputes

Beyond ideology, there is an uncomfortable technical consensus. Mining a block takes 10 minutes on average, making waiting for three confirmations painful for quick payments. Some propose reducing this to two minutes via a hard fork, despite reduced decentralization. Technical experts respond firmly: lowering block time solves nothing because it harms network propagation and increases orphaned blocks, wasting proof-of-work. What matters is proof of work, not the number of blocks.

The other major debate concerns mining's future. When block rewards become negligible, likely after 2050, professional miners will exit, computing capacity will drop, and blocks will take longer to mine. The algorithm will adjust hash targets to maintain 10-minute intervals, but the transition carries risks. Some claim the design is flawed from the start, while others defend it as the very guarantee of security.

The Argument That Unsettles Skeptics

The most unsettling defense for critics is philosophical, not technical. If the dollar, euro, and even gold rely on collective faith, why should Bitcoin be different? The entire financial system, states, and institutions rest on the shared belief that something has value. Bitcoin is the newest example, but not the only one. What matters is not intrinsic value, but the strength of conviction among its users.

This argument has a troubling derivative: once people believe in something, value sustains itself because no one wants to admit they were deceived. The open question is not whether Bitcoin is a bubble, but how long a bubble involving millions of participants can last. Or is the euro not one too?