[LINK] Bitcoin is hitting new highs—here’s why it might not be a bubble

[Jim Birch]

Hamish Moffatt wrote:


> The author argues that pretty much anything you think a blockchain would
> be useful for, would be better off without a blockchain.


Sooner or later digital currencies will become standard because the
economic friction of transfers is approximately zero.  Banks and credit
card companies will no longer collect 2% of retail sales.   AFAICS the
participants will be highly identified to the currency authority though the
transactions don't have to be public.  From a taxation point of view, this
makes tax evasion a lot more difficult.  The government will eventually
require transactions above some amount to use the system and this will make
sense for normal people.  (I'm not a libertarian and I see this as a good
thing.)  This is the opposite to the cryptocurrency model where the parties
are anonymous but the transactions are public.

This will use the country's own currency - so enable a high level of real
time economic monitoring - and won't rely on the tenuous mechanism of a
public blockchain database held by random interested participants and
computed and communicated when they feel like it.

Jim