In the same way that an escalating price does not validate cryptocurrency as legitimate, a collapsing price does not necessarily reveal it to be a fraud. Its long-term staying power will be determined by a whole host of other aspects in addition to investor sentiment and price behavior.
Is cryptocurrency money? The short answer to this question is clearly yes since we’ve already established that pretty much anything can be money, and cryptos meet most of the general criteria for something to be considered as such. The more relevant question is whether or not they are a good form of money.
The meteoric rise of the “cryptos” has been one of the most fascinating phenomena we’ve seen in our careers, and we continue to watch its development with great interest on a daily basis. In this week’s Insight we’ll rewind the clock about ten years and provide a high level review on how we got to where we are today.
We cannot have a conversation about cryptocurrencies without having a conversation about the blockchain. In simple terms, the blockchain is the digital architecture upon which cryptocurrencies are built. It is the accounting system, the ledger, the mechanism for keeping the transactional history for any particular cryptocurrency.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “When you boil it [cryptocurrencies] down, all it really is, is an online ledger. The difference is that there’s no government backing it. The ledger is maintained automatically on a network of computers.”
In our first post in this series, we talked about how money has implied value due to a society wide networking effect. We determined that one of the most important aspects of good money is that it is widely accepted. In this week’s post we’ll look at why certain forms of money, such as the US Dollar, are much more widely accepted than others.
Pretty much anything can be used as money, but not all forms of money are created equal. In this week’s post, we will look at different aspects of money which can be used as a sort of moneyness test to differentiate between good and bad forms of money.
There are two key takeaways from the history of money. First, pretty much anything can act as a form of money as long as everyone agrees that it is so and secondly, no form of money is immune to failure.
Most people understand that money is valuable because it can used to purchase all the stuff we want and need, but not many people truly understand its substance. What makes money valuable and what makes one form of money better than another?
Michael Crichton was probably best known for his works of science fiction, but what many people may not know is that before Michael was a well-known author, he was on track to becoming a doctor. He eventually gave up his career in medicine to focus on his writing, but his brief experience in the field gave him a healthy respect for the complexity of life.
They say that bulls climb stairs and bears jump out the window. That description certainly seems apropos for what we’ve just witnessed. After over a year of some of the smoothest sailing ever seen in stocks a swift and violent correction snatched away the market’s year-to-date gains.
Following the financial crisis Americans entered “retrenchment” mode and spent nearly ten years focused on shoring up their lifestyle, reduced debt loads and saving money for longer-term purposes. It appears this mindset is finally melting away.
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