Why you would be crazy to actually spend bitcoin

Speculative fervor makes the cryptocurrency clumsy for commerce

A little more than four years ago, Coupa Café, a caramel-macchiato joint in Palo Alto, began accepting bitcoin. This was shortly before the first big bitcoin rush briefly pushed the cryptocurrency’s price from about $100 to more than $1,000. At the time, two or three Coupa customers a week would pay their bills with bitcoin, says co-owner Camelia Coupal. Today, the number is ... still two or three people a week. “It’s a really minimal part of our sales,” she says. “It’s really just a quirky thing for our customers.”

That’s the story of bitcoin this past year: The cryptocurrency