During 2013, Bitcoin went through a transformation from hyper-geek to bourgeois adoption -- attracting ever more mainstream interest. I recall getting a call from a friend who is a choral conductor in London, taking a break from his job conducting a boys’s choir “How can I get into Bitcoin market?” he demanded. Hmmm, this just might be a bubble. And let’s be real: this new interest that sprang into being was not because people began to understand the functionality of distributed networks, cryptography, and open-source protocols that operate as both payment systems and alternatives to nationalized monies. The reason for the extraordinary rise in interest in Bitcoin comes to down the usual driving force of great innovations: the clamor for return...or greed, if you will. I don’t mean that disparagingly, by the way. There’s a lot of money on the loose around the world hunting for some yield. With central banks and government policy pushing rates of return to the zero and negative range, there seems to be nowhere else to go. Maybe Bitcoin is the new gold, the new real estate, the new 1990s-style stock. Does this speculative element discredit the technology? The right historical analogy here might be railroads of the 19th century. Day to day, the headlines that pertained to railroads were dominated by technological failures, stock-market scandals, deceptions, crooks and scam artists, and legally dubious rackets of all sorts. Entirely lost in the daily grind was the bigger picture: railroads were transforming the entire economic infrastructure, catapulting civilization into a transformative epoch. So too with Bitcoin.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 16:28:44 +0000
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