This is a mistake.

For bitcoin is not a currency; it is not money—it is a speculative hedge, an investment, a form of trading, and, quite possibly, the great white whale of finance.

Possibly—but only possibly.

The temptation to talk about bitcoin as the sole product of its inventor’s brilliance has grown during the crypto bubble because, as we know from the history of equity markets and from history as a whole, perception is all. And with a product as new as bitcoin, the halo effect is just enormous.

People talk about bitcoin because they can. After all, even if it has a host of technical limitations and flaws, it is not as boring as the existing consumer-facing products from the payment sector. And bitcoin is not as easy to move money as, say, the ability to convert cash to gold or fiat currency (the dollar, yen, pound, euro). But it’s a hedge, or an investment, or a speculative play, or a currency trading instrument, and those are all ways of getting one to your place of business, or to the point of travel, or to a lender. And, hence, it’s all there in one place, in crypto.

And, especially as I indicated here, it is far easier to talk about bitcoin than to talk about gold, and perhaps even to get people to look at fiat currencies. In that sense, bitcoin is both a new form of money and a solution to the demand for money among an otherwise invisible set of people.

Although bitcoin is a speculative play, I also think its rise tells us something very much larger about how our financial systems work—even if we haven’t come to terms with those larger forces.

Bitcoin is hardly the first effort to create some sort of secure virtual currency that was supposed to replace the US dollar, or a basket of other currencies, or whatever. But here is my problem: I don’t understand how money is supposed to be created. The same people who worry about the lack of transparency in many virtual currencies are of the same people who do not fully understand how accounting works, yet they throw around nearly impossible-to-review theories as if they were all knowable as gospel.

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