Opinion | Bubble, Bubble, Fraud and Trouble
And while most of us can go years without seeing a $100 bill, there are a lot of those bills out there — more
than a trillion dollars’ worth, accounting for 78 percent of the value of U. S. currency in circulation.
There’s really no reason to use Bitcoin in transactions — unless you don’t want anyone to see either what you’re buying
or what you’re selling, which is why much actual Bitcoin use seems to involve drugs, sex and other black-market goods.
As Robert Shiller, the world’s leading bubble expert, points out, asset bubbles are like “naturally occurring Ponzi schemes.”
Early investors in a bubble make a lot of money as new investors are drawn in, and those profits pull in even more people.
Like Bitcoins, $100 bills aren’t much use for ordinary transactions: Most shops won’t accept them.
When it comes to cryptocurrencies there’s an additional factor: It’s a bubble,
but it’s also something of a cult, whose initiates are given to paranoid fantasies about evil governments stealing all their money (as opposed to private hackers, who have stolen a remarkably high proportion of extant cryptocurrency tokens).
Although the modern dollar is a “fiat” currency, not backed by any other asset, like gold, its value is ultimately backed by the fact
that the U. S. government will accept it, in fact demands it, in payment for taxes.
