Jessica Irvine, the National Economics Editor at the Australian Daily Telegraph overviews Bitcoin and concludes: "
bitcoin is a distraction. It's a classic bubble. Trust me."http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/jessica-irvinehttp://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/jessica-irvine/bitcoin-a-bubble-best-avoided-argues-jessica-irvine/story-fnj45kvd-1226766825875http://i.imgur.com/V1KNdwr.jpg"Bit coins are created every day by users. Presently 12 million exist, but the founders have said only 21 million will ever exist. [...]
So should you run out an buy bitcoins?
Short answer: no.
Remember, currencies are only worth what people will pay for them. And that depends on trust and scarcity.
First, scarcity. While the number of bitcoins is supposed to stop at 21 million, whose to say that will happen? The whole point is that it is user generated and not policed by a middle man.
Which brings me to trust. All transactions must be based on trust, and it's hard to see how anonymous users making promises to each other can be trusted in the long term There is a genuine revolution underway in internet transactions. But bitcoin is a distraction. It's a classic bubble.
Trust me."Trust me? She wants her readers to trust her when she has not researched her subject, has no clue about peer-to-peer decentralized consensus, the Bitcoin protocol, or what mining actually does. You don't have to be a programmer to know that the same software running on 200,000 separate computers which cross-checks its results is incredibly resilient. Did she not read that even the US Federal Reserve admits that Bitcoin is technically a tour-de-force?
This is a National Economics Editor happy to dismiss a revolutionary economic paradigm without learning about it properly. This might be OK when making a decision for oneself, but not happily advising thousands of readers who, presumably, she wants to take her articles, and indeed her newspaper seriously.
F- for this one. Got to try much harder.
(Not in the press section - because this is illustrating the general point that many journalists and economists who dismiss Bitcoin have not learned about it properly).
