Occam's Razor

In December 2013 I looked at Bitcoin and called it libertarian bit nonsense. Like most pundits, I’m not good at admitting I was wrong. But I was wrong about Bitcoin. In December 2013 a Bitcoin was worth about $716. As of today one Bitcoin is worth about $3250. (See this index chart.) So if bought a Bitcoin in December 2013 and traded it today for U.S. dollars, your return on investment would be 354%. That’s an annual return of 96%. You are not going to get that sort of return from an S&P 500 index fund.

The dates I picked were random so coins bought at other times might have lost money. In truth if you had bought a Bitcoin in December 2013 you would have to have waited until November 2016 to see a positive return on your investment. For the last year or so though Bitcoin appears to be picking up real traction, taking the new currency to surreal highs.

One reason I was wrong in 2013 is that back then I did not anticipate its major use. Back then it was used for shady transactions but existed on the fringes of this world. Bitcoin seems to have found its niche as a method for facilitating ransomware. Illicit hackers are using it to get money from you when they do things like hijack your computer and won’t let you access key parts of it until you pay them sufficient Bitcoins. (Even then it works only about half the time.) If they asked for dollars or yen then hiding their tracks would be much harder. Making you go out and buy Bitcoins and then sending it to them though makes anonymous electronic thievery much more possible and practical. While each transaction is recorded in the Bitcoin itself, there is no mechanism in the transaction to positively identify the buyer and seller. Thus it’s much harder to catch electronic thieves at work.

I doubt these thieves hang onto their Bitcoins. Bitcoins are still a hassle to trade. Bitcoin exchanges are few and their trustworthiness not to mention solvency are problematic. Thieves probably don’t see the Bitcoins they collect as investment since they are hard to spend on real world goods and services. Most likely they are quickly converted into a local currency where they are then used to buy goods and services.

As a libertarian currency, Bitcoin is having some success. It is theoretically money that can be stored and used independent of taxation, although legitimate sellers that accept Bitcoins probably have to charge taxes on Bitcoin transactions. The percent of sellers that accept Bitcoins though is still tiny, which provides evidence that their value comes from being able to transmit value relatively free from prying eyes. This is one aspect of cash that allows it to endure into the 21^st century.

So while Bitcoins may appeal to the libertarians among us, its primary usage is probably to facilitate crime, thus its value and surging price. The harder it becomes to trade illicit money with conventional currencies, the more valuable Bitcoins become, since there are a finite number of Bitcoins out there. Most governments are getting quite good at monitoring transactions of conventional currency. Transactions that are too large result in inquiries that may slow down or stop the transfer of money. With Bitcoins this is currently not much of an issue. Governments are getting better at regulating these transactions. At one time China blocked Bitcoin transactions altogether. They are accepted on certain Chinese exchanges now, but China is proposing to make Bitcoin exchanges subject to money laundering laws and to collect information verifying the identity of buyers and sellers exchanging Bitcoins.

As I noted in 2013, the more a Bitcoin is traded, the larger its digital fingerprint becomes. Some of these coins are becoming so digitally huge that they are inefficient to verify it is a legitimate coin. This is frustrating to many in this community, which is causing other more practical digital currencies to emerge like Ethereum. Currencies like Ethereum try to address issues like the huge blockchains in many Bitcoins and to build in features like identifying buyers and sellers and a limited blockchain ledger. If they gain traction then this undercuts Bitcoin’s ability to keep these transactions confidential.

Whether Bitcoin or some other form of digital currency, all such currencies that rely on blockchain technology are inherently risky, for the same reason that I noted in 2013: they are potentially hackable because they are encrypted. So far to our knowledge no one has successfully hacked into a Bitcoin. If it happens though that a hacking algorithm or a quantum leap in computing power reveals an easy way to mine new Bitcoins then the coin should drop in value precipitously and become essentially worthless. However, if a coin can be “minted” by a provable and legitimate source, say a country’s equivalent of a Federal Reserve, then such digital currency should hold value. This could be done by such organizations holding a registrar of coins it has “minted” that are publicly electronically available.

If that happens though then the onus for having a Bitcoin also goes away, as its value is in its surreptitiousness. Electronic coins that only go through legitimate exchanges and follow policies for tracking and handling illicit uses become essentially legitimate currencies because they are issued and accepted by trusted institutions.

So there are likely to be many more digital coins in our future. Bitcoin’s future as an electronic currency though is likely coming to an end as it becomes computationally inefficient to record transactions with Bitcoins and as advancements in computers, like potential quantum computing potentially render obsolete our current methods of encrypting data, making the encryption keys faster to crack.

Bitcoin’s time has arrived but with its success it is also likely quickly passing into obsolescence. What comes next is unknown but any permanent way of electronically storing untraceable electronic value was probably always myth.