The cryptocurrency doesn’t serve “any socially useful function.”

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has condemned Bitcoin as “successful only because of its potential for circumvention [and] lack of oversight,” and has called for it to be banned.



In a Bloomberg Television interview, he said the cryptocurrency doesn’t serve “any socially useful function.”

He believes Bitcoin is a bubble, that will give “a lot of people a lot of exciting times as it rides up and then goes down.”


Past the $10,000 mark

The value of one Bitcoin went past $10,000 for the first time this week – continuing the huge rises seen since the beginning of 2017.

At the start of the year, it was worth just $998.

Bitcoin's rapid increase in value has led many analysts – including Stiglitz and fellow Nobel Prize laureate Robert Shiller – to suggest Bitcoin's rise is unsustainable and a price collapse is almost inevitable.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/joseph-stiglitz-bitcoin-ought-to-be-outlawed/?utm_content=bufferced80&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer


JPMorgan CFO Dials Back Dimon's Criticism That Bitcoin is a 'Fraud'

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon got the market’s attention by calling bitcoin a “fraud” last month, but he declined to discuss the topic on Thursday as his finance chief dialed back some of his earlier comments.

“We are very open minded to the potential use cases in future for digital currencies that are properly controlled and regulated,” chief financial officer Marianne Lake said during a call with reporters to discuss the bank’s third quarter earnings.

Lake also said the bank is “very optimistic” about some of the technology that underlies bitcoin and other digital currencies, a view echoed by Citigroup CFO John Gerspach on that bank’s earnings call with reporters, also on Thursday.

Gerspach said he sees potential for a “real commercial application” for blockchain, the technology that powers trading in digital currencies like bitcoin.

Gerspach also said cryptocurrencies themselves are “worthy of exploration.”

The comments came on a day when the price of bitcoin soared above $5,000 for the first time.

The rise of bitcoin and other digital currencies has created a divide on Wall Street.

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While many support the use of blockchain, a ledger technology, to speed up and improve trading more broadly, some bankers are opposed to dabbling in actual cryptocurrencies that are not regulated or backed by national governments and have been involved in a number of scandals.

In addition to calling bitcoin a fraud in September, Dimon said he would fire any traders at his bank who touched bitcoin.

Within weeks, CEOs of rivals Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group offered different views, saying the currency was worth further consideration.

On Thursday’s call, when asked about the topic again, Dimon laughed and said, “I am not going to talk about bitcoin anymore.”

Source:
http://fortune.com/2017/10/12/jpmorgan-cfo-dimon-bitcoin-is-a-fraud/


Leading Economist Predicts a Bitcoin Backlash

Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

by Will Knight  October 14, 2013

A distributed, digital currency could allow new forms of online and mobile commerce—and perhaps challenge established financial systems.


Governments and established financial institutions are likely to launch a campaign to quash the decentralized digital currency Bitcoin, according to a leading economist and academic. Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, expects Bitcoin to face political pressure and aggressive lobbying from big banks because of its disruptive nature.

Simon Johnson
Money matters: Simon Johnson on stage at EmTech.
“There is going to be a big political backlash,” Johnson said on stage at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last Thursday. “And the question is whether the people behind those currencies are ready for that and have their own political strategy.”

The system of cryptographic software behind Bitcoin represents a significant technical advance, and the currency has inspired many cyber-libertarians (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why It Matters”). Mathematical and computer networking principles are used to underpin a system through which financial transactions can be made digitally, without the need for any central authority or financial institution.

The code that supports and regulates the Bitcoin network is built into the software needed to use the currency. It works in a distributed network across the Internet to confirm transactions and prevent counterfeiting. Adding to the mystique, the technical expert or experts who developed the Bitcoin protocol are still unknown.

After several years as a nerdy curiosity, the currency has recently gained momentum as a legitimate means of payment. Many Bitcoin-based businesses are springing up, some backed by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists (see “Bitcoin Hits the Big Time, to the Regret of Some Early Boosters”).

However, Johnson says that Bitcoin’s success will draw increased attention from governments and regulators, who are used to having tight control over currencies. He believes they will be egged on by established financial institutions, which will likely seek to quash the currency. Bitcoin enables very rapid, cheap transfers and payments that could compete with existing fee-based ways of moving money around. “Any bankers watching this should be very afraid,” said Johnson.

Bitcoin opponents could get ammunition for their campaign from the recent case of Silk Road, an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for illicit drugs. The FBI arrested a man on suspicion of running the site and seized the servers that ran Silk Road. The site was hidden from the open Internet using the anonymous networking technology Tor.

Johnson suggested that this kind of controversial association could certainly put pressure on Bitcoin. “People care a lot about how monies are used,” he said. “They care about the various behaviors associated with monies.”

Indeed, it appears that Bitcoin is coming under increased scrutiny from lawmakers and politicians. Stephen Pair, cofounder and CTO of the Bitcoin payments company Bitpay, says his company has been contacted by state and national officials who have subpoenaed information about its activities.

Pair rejects any suggestion that the currency has any special association with illegal activities. “Just because you use Bitcoin and Tor doesn’t mean you can get away with breaking the law,” he says. “I would not advise people to see Bitcoin as a means of subverting the legal system.”

Johnson, who served as chief economist for the International Monetary

Johnson, who served as chief economist for the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, said he thinks supporters of the “crypto-currency” could head off opponents by persuading politicians and legislators that it represents an opportunity for international innovation. “They shouldn’t sit back and wait for other people to define them in terms of Silk Road or anything else,” he said in an interview after the conference. “They should be proactive and explain why this would be a great industry for the U.S. to develop, and why they should have appropriate regulation around that.”

He also said that some governments outside the U.S. may feel threatened by Bitcoin because it allows citizens and companies to sidestep restrictions on the movement of funds across their borders.

Source:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520296/leading-economist-predicts-a-bitcoin-backlash/


Blockchain and bitcoin: In search of a critique

Growing criticism hasn't stopped a bubble in the valuations of cryptocurrencies and the security-like 'coins' sold in 'ICOs', writes Martin Walker

One of the few things that has grown as fast this year as the price of cyptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, is the number of books available about them, along with blockchain technology and their many derivatives. There are now in excess of 500 books available on Amazon on these topics. These books include excellent technical guides like “Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain” by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, breathless accounts of the (short) histories of these technologies and wildly enthusiastic visions of a cryptocurrency- or blockchain- based future.

To the people who have sat through lectures on these topics at financial institutions around the world, there may a feeling of surprise that there are 500 people who understand this topic. However, a fair number of these books are frankly deranged, offering no real explanation of how these technologies work or how they will live up to the promises made.

You would think this would leave the reader spoilt for choice but there is a key type of book missing: “the critique”. Criticism of the cryptocurrencies in the media and more broadly on the internet has been growing for some time, with their association with organised crime, ransomware and money laundering. In spite of this we have seen a bubble emerge in both the valuations of cryptocurrencies and the security-like “coins” sold in initial coin offerings (ICOs), a blockchain-based cousin of the initial public offering (IPOs), when a company sells stocks in the market for the first time. Cynicism about the application of blockchain-type technologies in banking and capital markets has also increased, as people in the financial sector have grown impatient for the delivery of tangible products.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts, by David Gerard, is the first real, “no holds barred”, attack on the whole bitcoin/cryptocurrency/blockchain movement. Unlike many of the bitcoin/blockchain fanboys, Gerard is a true techie with long history in IT. He is also one of the founders of the notorious Reddit “buttcoin” forum, which combines bitcoin parody with often expert, logical analysis.

The book is primarily focused on bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, where it provides some excellent analysis of the reality behind many of the headlines. Do you believe that bitcoin is saving the people of Venezuela from starvation or helping the billions of unbanked climb their way out of poverty? You may change your mind after reading Gerard’s analysis of the truth behind the hype.

Equally informative is his detailed explanation of how the crypto-markets and their infrastructure work (often sporadically) in reality. If have been lulled into quiet belief that bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies are turning into another asset class worth diversifying into, the reality will make you think otherwise. In just a few short years, everything that was bad about capital markets (which both regulators and the industry itself have worked so hard to deal with) have been replicated in the bitcoin/cryptocurrency world. Fraud, market manipulation, regulatory arbitrage, insider trading, unreliable infrastructure, blatant support of criminal activity and Ponzi schemes are rife.

There is less material on the more general application of technologies such as smart contracts and blockchain in finance but the chapters on these topics are a very useful antidote to frequently exaggerated claims. Gerard carefully points out the major technical and legal problems with the basic concept of a “smart contract”.  The computer programs referred to as “smart contracts” are seldom either legal contracts or even particularly smart. In his blockchain chapter, he does not reject the possibility that research and development in this area may eventually produce something of value but he does provide a very useful set of questions to ask “blockchain salesmen” to establish whether their products are real software or simply dreams.

Enthusiasts will criticise this book for lack of balance but this is not an area where it is easy to find any alternative views. If you are interested in cryptocurrencies or blockchain (even if you already an enthusiast) it is worth reading this book simply to challenge your assumptions.

♣♣♣

Notes:

The post gives the views of the interviewee, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics.
Featured image credit: Photo by William Bout on Unsplash
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Martin Walker is Banking and Finance Director at the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa) and produces research for financial consultancy Finadium. He has extensive experience in investment banking IT and operations. His roles included Global Head of Securities Finance IT at Dresdner Kleinwort and Global Head of Prime Brokerage Technology at RBS Markets. He also held roles at Merrill Lynch and HSBC Global Markets, where he was the Blockchain lead in Markets Operation. Additionally, Martin worked for the R3 CEV Blockchain collaborative on product development and has published two papers on the topic: Blockchain And The Nature of Money, and Bridging the Gap Between Investment Banking Architecture and Distributed Ledgers (R3 CEV Research – Mar 2017)

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/10/30/blockchain-and-bitcoin-in-search-of-a-critique/


It Looks Like Nobel Economics Laureates Don't Like Bitcoin
By Aaron Eglitis  and Milda Seputyte
November 30, 2017, 5:21 PM GMT+3

A day after Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz said bitcoin should be outlawed, another winner of the economics prize said the digital currency will eventually repeat the U.S. stock market crash that preceded the great depression.

Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist whose work covers the prediction of asset prices -- and the inefficiency of markets -- said the attraction of the currency was a narrative akin to a "mystery movie" that draws in people who want to outsmart the system.

"Bitcoin, it’s just absolutely exciting," Shiller said at a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania on Thursday. "You’re fast. You’re smart. You’ve figured out nobody else understands. You’re with it. And bitcoin has this anti-government, anti-regulation feel. It’s such a wonderful story. If it were only true."

Price swings in the world’s most popular digital currency are increasing amid speculation that bitcoin’s almost 1,000 percent gain this year may not continue. Bitcoin surpassed $11,000 in a matter of hours after reaching $10,000 on Wednesday. It then fell almost 20 percent before recovering.


Robert ShillerPhotographer: Chris Rank/Bloomberg
“I don’t know where it’s going to stop," said Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013. "It’s going to go way up, like the stock market in the 1920s. We will reach a 1929 eventually. But then it won’t go to zero, it just will come down.”

A day earlier, Stiglitz called bitcoin "a bubble" that’s going to excite people as it rides up and then drops.

“So it seems to me it ought to be outlawed,” Stiglitz said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua and Tom Keene. “It doesn’t serve any socially useful function.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-30/so-it-looks-like-nobel-economics-laureates-don-t-like-bitcoin


https://bcorpus.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-cryptocurrency-doesnt-serve-any.html


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