Bitcoin Obituaries

BITCOIN’S price volatility is a pedigree of the rampant trader speculation which has fuelled the rise of the cryptocurrency, according to a top member of the Governing Board of the Austrian National Bank, Kurt Pribil. The banking chief explained his “unambiguous position”, underlining that the way he sees it, cryptocurrencies have no inherent value behind..

The general manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has savaged bitcoin as a “combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster.” In a lecture given in Frankfurt, Germany, Carstens said there were cracks appearing in the “house of bitcoin” as too many copycat currencies had forked off the technology, including..

Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Macro Associates said Bitcoin is the “biggest bubble in human history” and this “mother of all bubbles” is finally crashing, in an interview with Tom Keene and Francine Lacqua on Bloomberg Television. It isn’t just Bitcoin, Roubini added. There are more than 1,300 cryptocurrencies or initial coin offerings, and “most of them are..

So is bitcoin a giant bubble that will end in grief? Yes. But it’s a bubble wrapped in techno-mysticism inside a cocoon of libertarian ideology. In principle, you can use bitcoin to pay for things electronically. But you can use debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. to do that, too — and bitcoin turns out to..

You see despite bitcoin being categorised as a “currency”, it is not a currency. There really is no such thing as “cryptocurrency”. For a currency to be legitimate it needs to be: backed by something, like an asset, or something with intrinsic value, like gold; it must be legal tender (and managed by a local..

Already, thousands of real businesses are using these technologies to disrupt every aspect of financial intermediation. Dozens of online-payment services – PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Venmo, and so forth – have hundreds of millions of daily users. Now, compare this real and ongoing fintech revolution with the record of blockchain, which has existed for almost..

Bitcoin is frustratingly inefficient compared to it’s many offspring. Transactions are slower and more costly than ever before, leaving users asking “This sucks! What’s next?” There are 2 main approaches to scaling the Bitcoin network: 1. The Lightning Network: Similar to Raiden or Trinity, this solution is simply moving the load from the Bitcoin network..

Will digital currencies dominate the future? Digital currencies are absolutely the future of money. However it’s unlikely that bitcoin is the ultimate winner. Regardless of the coding oddities that make it an inefficient vehicle (the mining code used makes it a colossal waster of electricity and processing power), the idea is simply too big for..

Bitcoin’s original value proposition was that it would be superior, as a medium of exchange, to cash, credit cards and bank transfers. On that basis, people would prefer holding bitcoins, or financial assets denominated in bitcoins, in place of existing currencies, especially the US dollar. If this were to happen, the value of the total..

…Because of the high price of Bitcoin, developers have raised the transaction fees on Bitcoin which negates its initial currency application. Plus the transaction speed of Bitcoin is a snail’s-pace when compared to many other cryptocurrencies. Much of the “new money” coming into the crypto market have no idea what they’re investing in. New investors..

Below are the five factors that have the potential to lead to the demise of Bitcoin. 1. Slowing Transaction Times Right now, it takes an average time of around 200 minutes to confirm a single Bitcoin transaction, according to Blockchain.com. The average time for the month of December was a whopping 2,322 minutes, or roughly..

Bitcoin is the product of justified frustration. Its designer explicitly said the cryptocurrency was a reaction to government abuse of fiat currencies like the dollar or euro. It was supposed to provide an independent, peer-to-peer payment system based on a virtual currency that couldn’t be debased, since there was a finite number of them. That..