Whither Blockchain?

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Article from Issue 212/2018
Author(s):

Is blockchain finally getting interesting? I guess it always has attracted some attention – if not as an investment at least as a generator of headlines.

Dear Reader,

Is blockchain finally getting interesting? I guess it always has attracted some attention – if not as an investment at least as a generator of headlines. Who could forget the Mount Gox bankruptcy [1] or Newsweek's unfortunate "unmasking" of a Bitcoin creator who turned out to be the wrong guy [2].

The value of a Bitcoin has compounded generously in recent years, and the people who got in early got lots of money (unless they lost track of their key [3]). The volatility is certainly insane; the cryptocurrency hit an all time high in December 2017, then lost two thirds of its value in two months, and then sprang back to about half of what it was in December. I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that when the price of anything jumps around that much, buying into it is a game of chance. One invests in Bitcoin the way one might "invest" in a lottery ticket.

[...]

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