As an investment, bitcoin was a particularly poor choice in 2014. You would have been better off with, well, just about anything else under the sun.

Here’s the now-familiar graph of the cryptocurrecny’s value from 12/31/13 to 12/31/14, courtesy of CoinDesk:

The value of a single bitcoin lost more than half its value from the start of 2014, when it stood at about $770 to presstime, when it stands at about $315. Tough stuff for speculators. But bitcoin enthusiasts have long said that its value lies not in its, well, value, as much as in the platform that powers it, the blockchain.

Innovation luminary Deva Annamalai of Zions Bank is of this school. Speaking to The Financial Brand’s Jim Marous about what changes 2015 will bring to banking, Annamalai was bullish on the blockchain:

The significant change I foresee for 2015 is the disruptive innovation of the BlockChain technology going mainstream. This decentralized technology truly has the power to change the way we do international payments, micropayment, money movement, smart contracts and real world asset tracking. The invention of Bitcoin is a watershed moment in payments and the Fintech industry.

He also predicted that bitcoin startups, already proliferating, will continue to build on the platform:

I believe 2015 will see a variety of innovative startups and existing companies launching new protocols and financial products and services based on Blockchain and the side chain technologies.

Hear, hear. The success of Ripple integrating with banks shows that the time savings and cost savings of virtual currency transactions can have a significant effect on banking. If greater regulatory clarity is established in 2015, as seems to be happening in New York, the price of bitcoin won’t be what is getting headlines, but the amount of time and money it is is saving both banks and customers.

Bitcoin micropayments could also serve as a saving grace for digital companies, including, for example, media companies, which offer a good use case of looking to monetize small pieces of content for small payments.

As 2014 ends, no one is excited about getting rich by just sitting on a heap of bitcoins. Instead there is great excitement about seeing them flow in transactions, and this is a real sign of success. In this light, perhaps 2014 wasn’t such a disastrous year for Bitcoin as the pundits would have you believe.