And yet, that's not what happened when it forked Bitmain (who may have had 70-80% of Bitcoin's hashing power at one point) was the one to take the hardest hit and essentially folded; its founder was exited and disgraced, and the company was pivoted to what seems to be primarily an AI business now [2] after that utter failure to 'prove' what you have said is accepted as 'Truth' when its not simply true when it played out in this space.
I think what many, especially those not actively working or participating in this space, seem to not understand is that Bitcoin, and to some extent cryptocurrency in general, is defying the supposed 'conventional wisdom' by just exisiting and then disproving them with these occurences.
Most of the criticisms are cherry-picked and mis-focused to react to it in a negative light--eg the ICO craze had nothing to do with Bitcoin.
After all this time I don't see any of those price drops as bad, its allowing newer participants to into this system if seen as investment, that they otherwise may have not been able to enter. And for those that were using to transact for goods/services during this volatility it may have hurt, but as someone pointed out merchant adoption is not so large that it could kill a business right now, not to mention there are ways to mitigate this with other instruments (tethered to USD and such).
Also, the thing most people don't seem to understand either is that Bitcoin mining has spurred on tons of renewable energy projects and has since migrated to that to capture said efficiencies [3] as documented by the International Energy Agency. The network is estimated to be operating on 70% renewable energy, and is growing with projects like Theil's backed bitcoin mining facility in Texas [4].
1: https://www.ccn.com/bitmain-jihan-wu-micree-zhan-stepping-do...
2: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-mining-giant-bitmain-...
3: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th...
4: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th...
