Home   >   Digital Currencies   >   The Bitcoin Boom

The Bitcoin Boom

By on April 2, 2013
bitcoin digital currency cryptocurrency virtual currency math-based

On March 16th, the Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who’d been in office for about a month, announced a strategy to solve the country’s banking crisis. This plan met with instantaneous and violent opposition from the country’s citizens.

The following Monday, the price of the decentralized electronic currency bitcoin rose from forty-five to fifty-five dollars on the major exchanges, and by Wednesday it had nipped up to sixty-five dollars. The financial media generally agreed that the two dramas are related. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, it appears that Spaniards are liable to have been particularly active buyers of bitcoins that week, having taken the debacle in Cyprus as the likely sign of a forthcoming governmental plunder of their own savings.

That a number of panicked Europeans appear to have reckoned the wildly volatile, vulnerable, and tiny bitcoin market a preferable alternative to their own banking system, even temporarily, signals a serious widening of the cracks between the northern and southern E.U. countries in the wake of the euro-zone debt crisis. It also illustrates the broader collapse of trust that is threatening the world of global banking and fiat money.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-future-of-bitcoin.html

 

*Excerpt from The New Yorker.  News article copyright Maria Bustillos at The New Yorker.

You must be logged in to post a comment Login