Jeffrey Tucker, of Brownstone Institute, recently wrote a pretty scathing piece about bitcoin. He also wrote the foreword to Roger Ver’s new book, Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC.
Tucker’s analysis is that bitcoin’s initial promise of “money as freedom” has been hijacked by institutions - the legacy financial sector - as well as HODLing bitcoiners themselves. In short, he argues, bitcoin has failed the Hayek test for being a proper off-ramp currency. The main reason is that bitcoin has become a store of value, primarily, and not an effective transactional currency.
So, yes, I became an early enthusiast, writing hundreds of articles, even publishing a book in 2015 called Bit By Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World. I could not have known it at the time, but those were in fact the last days of the ideal and just before the protocol came to be controlled by a consolidated group of developers who jettisoned entirely the idea of peer-to-peer cash to turn it into a high-earning digital security, not a competitor with state-based money but rather an asset designed not to use but hold with third-party intermediaries controlling access.
He has a point. I paraphrase Francis Bacon: money is like muck, no use unless it is spread about.
Meanwhile, bitcoin’s relatively long run bull market continues - and the newly approved spot bitcoin ETF market, in the USA at least, is becoming a category killer. The usual suspect big gorillas of the legacy fiat financial world have been getting all bitcoiny - and enjoying the ride.
I caught up recently with Oya Celiktemur, Sales Director of Jacobi Asset Management, creator of Europe’s first, regulated, bitcoin ETF - based in Guernsey. I asked her if Jeffrey Tucker was right to point out that bitcoin had lost its way and that institutions were part of the problem.
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