Many are fascinated with the idea of bitcoin. Senate hearings held to discuss regulating bitcoin earlier this month were “lovefests,” according to The Washington Post. Abroad, Chinese investors are flocking. Bitcoin seems on the brink of respectability. Some of bitcoin’s appeal comes from the fact that it does not physically exist. Each bitcoin is just a string of numbers. Instead of a bank, a decentralized network of computers ensures the authenticity of bitcoin and issues new ones by doing complex calculations. This allows bitcoin to be traded peer to peer, bypassing credit card companies and payment processors. It’s digital cash, offering the same relative anonymity and freedom as a paper sack of bills. WikiLeaks began accepting bitcoin donations in 2011 in order to bypass PayPal and credit card companies, which had frozen payments to the organization. Everything would be for sale to anyone all the time, 100 percent tax-free. Many of bitcoin’s hard-core fans see the currency as a revolutionary step toward this anarchocapitalist wonderland and is mainly innovative in the way of credit default swaps: new ways to gamble with money.
Reader Response To what extent would you agree with the writer that bitcoin will not last as a form of currency?
I agree with the author to a large extent that bitcoin will not last as a form of currency. "Bitcoin is built on a weird mix of the most old-fashioned kind of speculative greed, bolstered by a contemporary utopian cyberlibertarian ideology." Apart from dealing with otherwise illegal substances on Silk Road, there seems to be hardly any daily value in bitcoin, in terms of buying daily commodities. In my opinion, bitcoin is at best a trading currency, like a fluctuating stock market; everyone is cashing in because the value of bitcoin is continually rising, but how many of them actually spend these bitcoins? "So many have bought in because the Internet is very good at stoking the fear of missing out. There’s even a trendy acronym, FOMO, to describe the anxiety inspired by scrolling through the social media accounts of people having more fun than you. Bitcoin fosters a particularly potent brand of FOMO. " By seeing people gaining small riches, others are afraid of missing out on the cash; hence this line says it all - "Bitcoin is too dependent on speculative mania to be of practical use as a currency." I watched the value for bitcoin increase by more than USD$100 in a day; this shows that the value of bitcoin is so uncertain that it is impossible to pin down as a proper currency to be used. If one day someone decides to sell tons of bitcoins and send the price crashing down, everyone is just going to lose a lot of money, and public interest will fizzle out really, really quickly.
a. The summary was easy to understand but they could have rearranged to give a bit of background info on what was a bitcoin right at the start,
ReplyDeleteb. they could have explained the quote a little in simpler terms before going on to explain.
Could have explained the technical terms
However their view is expressed clearly and have evaluated and provided the relevant evidence to back up their stand.
-Felicia Yee and Leandra Nair