This is an excerpt from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any Other Business’ column.
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Hardeep Singh
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I don’t know which is more worrying: that the bitcoin market becomes madder by the day, or that it becomes more mainstream. The market price of a unit of the cryptocurrency has spiked above $11,800, up from $750 a year ago, for no reason other than speculative fever. The total value of bitcoins in existence (if that’s the right word) has surpassed the GDP of New Zealand. The first bitcoin billionaires have been announced as Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the American twins who were in at the birth of Facebook. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is about to launch its first bitcoin futures contract and an analyst at JPMorgan says bitcoin could soon rival gold as a safe-haven holding. What started as a virtual mystery story is fast becoming part of global financial furniture while regulators, central banks and Wall Street bosses watch, warn and try to work out what the real-world impacts will be if bitcoin self-combusts.
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