On March 24th, Fidelity Investments announced that it's presently looking to establish its own protocol for electronic transfer of funds, filing its S-1 form with the SEC. In a mad scramble, Goldman Sachs did the exact same thing. Elon Musk announced through Twitter that Tesla automobiles would be available for purchase through Bitcoin, and that the funds would not be exchanged back to fiat currency post-transaction. Even Microsoft is getting their toes wet, by launching a decentralized identity platform built on the Bitcoin blockchain.

And yet despite all of these advances, the exchange rate for a Bitcoin has fallen to a two-week low, sinking to $50,000 as of March 25th.

So what gives? Why are large institutions with lots of money at their disposal choosing now of all times to announce their participation in the world of cryptocurrency?

As much as we might enjoy ridiculing those in positions of power -- especially if they're affiliated with political positions we find disagreeable -- I think it's disingenuous to reduce the decision making of powerful people to mere stupidity. I'm personally not one to jump to the conclusion that large, rich, powerful individuals attain and maintain their positions of influence by sheer accident. It might happen occasionally, but for the most part, powerful rulers get to where they are and stay where they are because they're good at paying the people that keep them in power. Every president requires lawmakers to write laws and officers to enforce them. Every dictator requires soldiers to launch invasions and generals to organize them. And every executive requires pencil pushers to write transactions and a board of directors to manage them.

It might not seem like it'd make a lot of sense for Tesla to pick this moment to start exchanging automobiles for a make-believe digital MacGuffin that just lost about 20% of its value. But rather than announcing our criticisms, let's try to consider the decisions of these financial giants from their perspective. For a minute, let's set aside our obsessions with bull markets and bear markets. Let's cast aside our views of cryptocurrency as an investment in a portfolio. Let's stop looking at cryptocurrency as a stand-in for the stock market and try to view it for what it's labelled as:

A Currency.

I'm going to level with you -- I have a hard time understanding what money is. I still find it really odd that I bother to have several sheets of green cloth in my back pocket that are intrinsically without value -- except perhaps for making a fire. Even a sticky note would make for a better alternative. But nonetheless, it seems that if I present these sheets of cloth to somebody behind a cash register, I can receive nifty things in exchange for them, such as burritos. Hell, sometimes it's me on the other side of the register, and I accept these sheets of cloth without batting an eye. And then I deliver burritos.

One of the ways we measure the value we ascribe to money is from its purchasing power. If I can reliably perform this function of burrito-buying, I can come to expect some regular worth from the green sheets of cloth whenever I decide I want burritos. Anymore, I can think of purchases in terms of value down to a decimal place -- or even in the number of hours I put into attaining the currency to begin with. I'm certain we've all thought to ourselves "Four dollars for gasoline is too expensive -- I know a place that's selling it for $2.65 on a good day," or "I'm not quite sure I'm willing to pay six dollars for a beer at this restaurant. Not unless it's really worth it." We consider these values for everyday objects out of habit.

But unless you frequently partake in repugnant transactions that require cryptocurrency -- or maybe if you buy pizza from that one place that accepts dogecoin -- you probably don't think of the value of everyday items in terms of cryptocurrency. Even this very website is quick to summarize the total collection of tips from Ethereum tokens gifted to a post in the form of a native fiat currency. We're just not yet at a point in life where we can look at an item on a shelf and think to ourselves "I'd be willing to part ways with twelve-thousand Satoshi in exchange for that parcel."

I cringe a little when people loudly announce that they've just "bought" some amount of cryptocurrency, because it's really hard to buy a currency. That's not really the right word for it. If I were to tell my friends that I'd just bought several thousand Euros, the statement would hang in the air like the inflated crumbs of a stale biscuit. One does not buy Bitcoin, any more than one buys British Pounds, or Japanese Yen. Bitcoin is a currency which some people are willing to exchange for other currencies through a variety of means. But since cryptocurrency is a currency and not a commodity, it cannot be "bought" or "sold."

I'm similarly apprehensive about those who gravitate towards cryptocurrency as a means of making returns on an "investment," because I don't think investment is the right word either. If you heard from a bunch of your friends that they were going to dump their entire net worth into a boatload of Kazakhstani Tenge because they thought the price was about to skyrocket, you might think them irresponsible at best, mentally defective at worst. On the other hand, if you had it in mind that you wanted to visit or even move to Kazakhstan at some point in the future, taking the proactive step of exchanging some of your native currency for Tenge might be a worthwhile endeavor before you book your plane tickets.

As it stands, I'd wager that part of the reason that cryptocurrencies are such a volatile market -- excluding stablecoins -- is because their value isn't really rooted in anything specific. If I wanted to buy a burrito with cryptocurrency, I'd have a hard time knowing how much I'd be willing to spend with it -- never mind finding the right place to even spend my currency. Cryptocurrency is the currency of no nation by design. I can't really book plane tickets to crypto-landia because no such nation exists.

Now having established this, I see two immediate ramifications of large firms suddenly jumping to cryptocurrency:

• 1: The Introduction of Cryto as a More Useful Means of Exchange. When organizations like Tesla provide consumers with an outlet that they can use to exchange their cryptocurrency for something worthwhile, this has the potential to contribute to a stabilized market -- but we shouldn't necessarily expect it to increase the value of the currency. The more we see everyday items that can be exchanged for some form of cryptocurrency, the more an everyday consumer is able to make value judgements on its worth in terms of the cryptocurrency. This helps to allow a transition in mentality from USD to BTC -- no longer are we pigeonholed into viewing a chart comparing a dollar to a Bitcoin. Rather, we're able to compare a Bitcoin to something less abstract, more tangible, more useful to our everyday lives. Like a burrito.
• 2: The Willingness of Organizations to Place Some Percentage of Their Wealth in Cryptocurrency. Additionally, I think that if proponents of cryptocurrency -- using Elon Musk as an example -- truly do believe in its potential as a medium of exchange, they'd have every reason to want to amass large quantities of the token for a later date. This is where the falling value of the Bitcoin at present puts Elon in an advantageous situation. The drive for this exchange is exacerbated: since the value of the bitcoin is falling relative to the dollar right now, each passing day requires you to pay more of a particular cryptocurrency in exchange for a singular commodity of a fixed price. All those people who held onto a bitcoin wallet with some 50 BTC they mined from a GPU from 2012 now have something worthwhile to spend it on, and for this particular audience of consumers, there's an incentive to buy Tesla automobiles not tomorrow, but now, since the relative price of a car in BTC is climbing. If your cryptocurrency loses half of its worth by tomorrow, a Tesla cybertruck won't be. You can by more cryptocurrency at the bottom of the dip. But you can't exactly drive a distributed ledger to work.

Think about it like this. If you had a massive automobile factory, and you just learned that the price of gold fell to a penny per pound for no good reason, would you be inclined to make the decision to start selling cars in exchange for gold?

Now of course, I could be wildly off the mark with these guesses. There's a non-zero chance that Musk could be the sort of stupid who fails upwards by sheer luck and random chance, mixed with his unique reputation, who gets saved financially last minute by some deus ex machina. It wouldn't be the first time in our lifetimes we've seen somebody unfit for office land themselves in a position of power by a coincidental series of events. Hell, it wouldn't even be the first time it's happened to Elon Musk. There have been far too many instances prior where the man's been one failed rocket launch away from total bankruptcy.

I also don't think it's right to claim that Elon Musk, Tesla, Fidelity, etc, are deliberately manipulating the Bitcoin market. Bitcoin is a concept far greater than any one person or organization. Even if, somehow, a singular trillionaire were to start amassing large amounts of a cryptocurrency at a higher than average market price, it doesn't guarantee that others would be willing to follow suite. The value could still drop due to some unrelated event on the other side of the planet. Likewise, even if that trillionaire decided he or she was going to amass huge quantities of ASIC chips to begin mining every remaining token of crypto left in existence, that one individual would still be running against the computational power of literally everybody else on the planet -- and that's assuming everybody else would even find value in a currency that one unified organization sought to hold absolute power over. There are countless tokens out there, and new ones being invented all the time. You can't hold a monopoly over all of them.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I think it's important to remember that even if you bought Bitcoin at the worst possible moment during the bull run of 2017 -- back when its value was hovering around $17,000 --  that if you exchanged now, you'd still have tripled your value. Margin traders might see our recent decline in value as a reason to jump ship and sell. Those who are more optimistic might see this as the calm before the storm. And those who are opportunistic might see this as a prime opportunity to dig deep and expand their portfolio. Those who've been holding for the long run will have little reason to care about the ebbs and flows of the current, when their net worth may very well increase by an order of magnitude come the next decade.

But remember, most of those holding for the long run aren't looking to sell their cryptocurrency in exchange for US dollars. They're looking to exchange their currency for goods and services. And we're beginning to see a handful of vendors open the doors wide to those very goods and services.

If that's not reason enough to call these exciting times for cryptocurrency, then I'm not sure what is.

(Oh yeah, forgot to mention. This post is to be in no way considered financial advice. It's intended for informational purposes only. You should do your own research rather than listening to the singular opinions of a loon on the internet.)