The Fintech Bubble
Bitcoin has no real use or value.<p>As a means to &#x27;store wealth&#x27; - not really. There are 100 other things that make more sense than bitcoin.<p>As a &#x27;medium of exchange&#x27; - it will never be a common currency so it has no real value there. (A shopkeeper cannot price his 5% margin Milk in Bitcoins as the price fluctuates too much vis-a-vis the dollar, which he must also price his milk in).<p>The only real advantage of Bitcoin is total privacy, which 99.9% have no problem with, only people doing illegal things generally need this.<p>The small benefit of the fact you can bypass credit card charges etc. is entirely offset by the lack of de-facto security in Bitcoin - although it is &#x27;technically secure&#x27; - for the laymen, using it and securely storing &#x27;bitcoins&#x27; is not straightforward. That major Bitcoin repos have been hacked is evidence of that.<p>The banks are into &#x27;block chain&#x27; because they saw how quickly Bitcoin spread - and they can&#x27;t afford to not be part of a wave if it happens, but it won&#x27;t.<p>It&#x27;s funny that so many of bitcoins backers have absolutely no understanding of finance, currency, monetary policy etc..<p>It&#x27;s also funny how ideological people are about bitcoin:<p>&quot; I thought that Bitcoin was similar in many ways to the Internet. The metaphor that I used was that Bitcoin was like email - the first killer app - and that the Bitcoin Blockchain was like The Internet - the infrastructure that was deployed to support it but that could be used for so many other things. I suggested that The Blockchain was to finance&quot;<p>This is not particularly rational.<p>What we need are strong, well backed, resilient and responsibly managed currencies.<p>The only real systematic problem with today&#x27;s currencies are:<p>A) the oligcarchy of payment systems like visa grafting 1%-ish off the top and<p>B) monetary policy decisions that ultimately favour the banks.<p>It would be nice to get rid of A, but with bitcoin there is no &#x27;monetary policy&#x27; and that&#x27;s a much worse position than having central banks with the ability to do some degree of intervention, even if it&#x27;s not perfect.<p>The article is a good example of this - everyone talks about technology, but don&#x27;t bother to even mention finance, likely because they don&#x27;t have a clue.<p>Fintech of the blockchain sort is in a &#x27;bubble&#x27; because bitcoin does not solve any &#x27;problem&#x27; for 99% of people.<p>Even in 3rd world countries with scam currencies, the solution will migrate towards simply using the currency of the nearest nation with a credible currency, namely dollars, Euros, and possibly in the future, RMB.