Economists Bash Bitcoin In The Swiss Alps
Bashing Bitcoin (BTC) has apparently become a popular trend at Davos’ recent World Economic Forum event. More specifically, the cryptocurrency has become a punching bag. Just yesterday, per previous reports from Ethereum World News, Huw Van Steenis, the senior advisor to Bank of England’s governor, Mark Carney, bashed this nascent asset class.
Speaking to Bloomberg in a candid interview, Steenis, who purportedly is compiling a report about the future of finance, surprisingly claimed that cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin aren’t on his radar, or list of concerns for that matter. The former Morgan Stanley economist then remarked that blockchain-based assets “fail” the basic tests that financial services are de-facto run through. Steenis explained that BTC, along with other digital assets, is slow, fail to hold their value over time, and aren’t a viable, bonafide Medium of Exchange (MoE).
Tech Investor Claims BTC Will Fall To $0
Just one day later, BTC fell victim to another attack, as a technology investor and entrepreneur took to a CNBC-hosted panel to bash the blockchain-based digital asset. According to CNBC post-mortem on the manner, Jeff Schumacher, the founder of BCG Digital Ventures, a corporate investment and tech incubator group, claimed that the flagship cryptocurrency could capitulate to a value of zilch eventually.
Speaking to a crowd of economists, global leaders, notable investors, and corporate C-suiters, Schumacher explained that he “believes it will go to zero,” adding that he thinks that it (or the technology underlying Bitcoin) is a “great technology.” However, the BCG founder made it clear that he doesn’t think that blockchain technologies should be applied to currencies, accentuating that its underlying value isn’t based on anything. Like many traditionalists with a vested interest in the centralized system, Schumacher fails to see the value of a decentralized, immutable, cross-border, rapid, uncensorable current that transcends the boundaries imposed by financial incumbents.
Instead of lauding blockchain technologies for their potential revolutionary use cases in finance, Schumacher instead touched on the innovation’s ability to facilitate “open decentralized ecosystems,” which would be the global protocols and infrastructure that businesses could run on.
Yet, some weren’t in agreement with Schumacher’s inflammatory quip. Glenn Hutchins, the chairman of Virtu-affiliated North Island, a financial technology services company, claimed that BTC will likely grow to have a notable role as a Store of Value (SoV). Hutchins noted that BTC’s role “in the system” could be as pseudo-gold in a digital economy, rife with arrays of tokens that serve every use case imaginable.
Hutchins isn’t the only notable investor to think of Bitcoin as a digital semblance of the orange-esque precious metal. As reported by Ethereum World News multiple times previously, a number of pundits have overtly claimed that BTC’s foremost use case is as digital gold.
Alistair Milne, the CIO of Digital Currency Fund, claimed that Bitcoin has seen its Store of Value (SoV) proposition become more apparent. More specifically, he noted that Bitcoin’s investors are now “very aware that BTC is like trading gold with 100x leverage,” along with the fact that the flagship cryptocurrency’s inflation rate will be lower than that of the precious metal. And, as “no one appears to doubt the usefulness of gold,”
The Winklevoss Twins, the co-founders of the Gemini Exchange, recently claimed that Bitcoin “better at being gold than gold itself.” Twin Tyler noted that as this industry continues to develop, BTC will continue eating up bits of gold’s market capitalization, until the newfangled cryptocurrency passes its (arguably worse) physical counterpart.
Lou Kerner has also recently chimed in on the matter. Kerner, the founding partner at CryptoOracle, divulged that the cryptocurrency’s portability, ease-of-use, divisibility, and scarcity, make it a viable alternative to precious metals, and will allow BTC to eventually surmount its quintuple-digit cell.
Title Image Courtesy of Descryptive.com via Flickr
