The View | The bitcoin debate rages on, and so does its price
Goldman Sachs’ chief now offering his penny’s worth on cryptocurrency: Lloyd Blankfein thinks it won’t work out and is ’not comfortable with it’, yet reserves the right to be wrong and concedes it might after all, come to be a kind of currency.
I really never imagined I would be writing these words – but the plain fact of the matter is that I agree with Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, who says that based on everything he knows he thinks that bitcoin won’t work out and is ’not comfortable with it’, yet reserves the right to be wrong and concedes that it might after all, come to be a kind of currency.
Bitcoin traders have a very different view of things, causing the value of the cryptocurrency to rise to ever-greater heights, meaning in the past 12 months the price has surged by over 1,700 per cent.
The rabble of drug dealers, arms dealers and conspiracy peddlers, meanwhile, who initially embraced bitcoin, have now been joined by rather-more-respectable investment institutions, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Cboe Futures Exchange, which are introducing bitcoin derivatives, and even JP Morgan Chase is pondering trading futures in the cryptocurrency, despite the fact that Jamie Dimon, its boss has described bitcoin as a ‘fraud’.
When it was launched bitcoin was variously described as being an alternative payment system, then as a store of value and, as the ideologues piled in, we learned that the cryptocurrency provided an alternative to state manipulation of currency values and was somehow a pure market-driven entity.
The changing explanations continue, yet what we really know about bitcoin is still rather minimal.