An elaborate scam for ripping off gullible investors. A black-market currency for gun-runners, drug dealers, pimps and terrorists. A bubble that makes a 17th-century Dutch tulip look like a solid investment, and a drain on global energy. There are so many different ways the digital currency bitcoin is going to destroy the world it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. Everyone from Warren Buffett to Mark Carney has told us bitcoin is a serious threat to financial stability and any sane person should stay away.
True, there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of bitcoin. It’s volatile, complicated and largely unregulated. But given the appetite that clearly exists for it (market capitalisation at the time of writing was £85.7 billion), isn’t it time we began to consider seriously what its long-term success would mean for the global economy? After all, if money is fundamental to the way the world works, what happens when the very nature of money fundamentally changes?
In the ten years since it was created, bitcoin has had a seismic impact on the global financial system.
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