Jake's View | Let the search begin for viable alternatives to the world’s fiat currencies. Is bitcoin the answer?
What value does the dollar, or the euro, or the yen have, when the people responsible for maintaining it can play the fool like this with its underpinnings?
Transaction fees hamper everyday bitcoin use
-- South China Morning Post - Business , January 8
When is the last time you heard anyone say that bitcoin is here to stay?
I certainly cannot remember hearing anything of the sort recently. All that I hear and read is that bitcoin is a speculative bubble headed the way of the dodo bird.
Now I don’t pretend to understand how it works. People have explained blockchain to me before, that drew from me only a grimace of idiocy. I’m in my sixties. I was raised on vacuum tube technology. This one is beyond me.
As much as bitcoin’s recent trading does indeed exhibit the traits of a speculative bubble, I think there may be a lasting role for cryptocurrencies other than as a criminal’s money laundering currency of choice, which the reported impossibility of tracing transactions certainly makes bitcoin.
It is not because cryptocurrencies are necessarily so good that I think there is a lasting future for them. It is more that the traditional hard currencies - the dollar, the euro, the yen or any of them - are steadily losing the attributes that made them “hard.”
