Bitcoin
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I see the chief exec of the Financial Conduct Authority expresses this view:
Quote:Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the FCA, has said bitcoin is not a really currency but more like a commodity.If so, then those who designed Bitcoin will have got their wish — to have created a digital equivalent of gold (hence their "mining" analogy) — since the price of gold too is subject to speculative swings.Bitcoins and other so-called "cryptocurrencies" (Bitcoin's only one of many, there's another called "ether", which would be an appropriate name for money conjured up "out of thin air" if that's what they were) are tokens that have to be used to pay for the services offered by computer networks practising blockchain technology (see the Pathfinders column in this month's Socialist Standard). Bitcoin offers ultra-secure electronic payments but the technology can be used to offer as yet undeveloped services. So buying these tokens is a speculative investment in what might turn out to be a profitable venture. It's like the dot-com boom of the 1990s and should perhaps be called the blockchain boom.
Here is another attempt by a member of the "Bitcoin community" to claim that Marx would have supported bitcoins:https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-marxs-theory-history-1406321399/And here is a refutation from the same time (2014):http://www.marxist.com/bitcoin-utopian-reflection-of-capitalist-nightmare.htmAs Trotskyists their politics are crap but this article is rather good as is its conclusion
Quote:Bitcoin represents little more than an anarcho-capitalist pipe-dream and a speculator’s playgroundHere's a comment from a comrade on that quite good article on Bitcoin by, of all people, the section of Militant who stayed loyal to Ted Grant (and didn't try to usurp our name):
Quote:Yes, that’s pretty good though they ruin it near the end where they try to tie it in to their usual stuff about overproduction, glutted markets, etc. It says a lack of profitable investment outlets means that capitalists are pumping their money into Bitcoin, but there are of course plenty of profitable investment outlets and the people putting their money into crypto-currencies in the main are IT geeks and semi-professional gamblers not real capitalists.The Bank of International Settlements in Basel has just produced a report setting out why bitcoin (and similar so-called "cryptocurrencies") will never replace fiat money:http://www.itpro.co.uk/strategy/28261/bitcoin-newsThe BIS is the central banks' international so this is what you'd expect the "gnomes of Zurich" to say, isn't it? Perhaps, but that doesn't make what they say here wrong. Bitcoins are based on nothing. Fiat money is backed by the State and so has less chance of vanishing into thin air.In fact, ordinary money is better in this sense than all the "alternative" currency schemes that have been proposed, LETS as well as Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a scheme thought up by anarcho-capitalists to create a currency independently of the State. It is this but it is not only anarchists who don't like to be regulated by the State — drug dealers, arms merchants, money launderers, tax dodgers and sanctions busters don't either.As long as capitalism lasts ordinary State-backed money is going to be best (safest) for the sort of monetary transactions workers have to engage in. The only viable alternative to it of course is a society based on common ownership and production directly for use not profit where it too would become redundant.
Bitcoin has fallen to its lowest point since November and will probably be totally wiped out…https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bitcoin-latest-price-concurrency-money-exchange-rate-analysis-a8424651.html
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