by Summary:
An interesting article about Bitcoin in the Guardian today by Will Hutton. He seems to like it but he says it will never be quite the same as regular money as it is far too volatile for that. But blockchain changes everything. It becomes a means to transfer digital cash – or crypto-currencies, of which the best known is bitcoin – in vast amounts, across any border, instantaneously. The blockchain makes sure bitcoin is spent once; indeed, blockchain was first invented by the originators of bitcoin to make sure there was no fraud. No £30 limits. No credit or debit card necessary; no central bank or government needed to guarantee the value of the money. Just buy your bitcoin from an online broker and you have buying power in your digital wallet: better still, it may go up in value, giving
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An interesting article about Bitcoin in the Guardian today by Will Hutton. He seems to like it but he says it will never be quite the same as regular money as it is far too volatile for that. But blockchain changes everything. It becomes a means to transfer digital cash – or crypto-currencies, of which the best known is bitcoin – in vast amounts, across any border, instantaneously. The blockchain makes sure bitcoin is spent once; indeed, blockchain was first invented by the originators of bitcoin to make sure there was no fraud. No £30 limits. No credit or debit card necessary; no central bank or government needed to guarantee the value of the money. Just buy your bitcoin from an online broker and you have buying power in your digital wallet: better still, it may go up in value, giving
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
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An interesting article about Bitcoin in the Guardian today by Will Hutton. He seems to like it but he says it will never be quite the same as regular money as it is far too volatile for that.
But blockchain changes everything. It becomes a means to transfer digital cash – or crypto-currencies, of which the best known is bitcoin – in vast amounts, across any border, instantaneously. The blockchain makes sure bitcoin is spent once; indeed, blockchain was first invented by the originators of bitcoin to make sure there was no fraud. No £30 limits. No credit or debit card necessary; no central bank or government needed to guarantee the value of the money. Just buy your bitcoin from an online broker and you have buying power in your digital wallet: better still, it may go up in value, giving you more buying power still. The whole analogue apparatus of the financial system could be as severely challenged as newspapers and retailers are by online reading and internet shopping.
The question is whether banks are going to reinvent themselves using the blockchain as a key tool and become crypto-currency brokers before others. The trouble is that bitcoin, like other crypto-currencies, is not a reliable way of storing value – a key function of money – when its price can nearly halve in a week, as it did last week. Better not to think of bitcoin as money; rather, as a commodity that uses blockchain to make settlements faster, but it can’t – and never can – be a way for the mass of workers to get paid or make their purchases. It could take millions of transactions away from banks and badly wound them, but it’s unlikely to replace them.
But it could still represent a huge shock. Blockchain will administer similar shocks to insurance, healthcare and all mass payment systems. Intermediaries in the service industries will face a new world in which their routine functions will be performed by machines, programmed by artificial intelligence, while the blockchain becomes the new means to do business safely, faster and less riskily. There will be new concentrations of economic power because, like the Fangs, the blockchain economic model is more efficient and more effective the larger the network. Moving ever more economic activity into this universe, with its anonymised transactions and secret keys, may please the ultra libertarians – but there remains a public interest in ensuring accountability, justice and fairness. We have, in short, to understand and shape this new world before it shapes us. There are precious few signs of that.
The Guardian