Bitcoin and the conspiracy theorists

Those frothing at the mouth over this “monetary revolution” take refuge in mistrusting their government, or in lacking confidence in their currency that they think won’t be worth much the next day due to the actions of the central banks. Or it’s for both reasons, that alas have got a bit confounded in the minds of some who generally don’t dispose of much historical culture and are eager to devise and exalt the most unlikely of scenarios. They must without delay get rid of their euros and dollars, that is to say of traditional money which is the attribute of a sovereign state that has in their eyes failed. And they must above all no longer put any faith in a politico-monetary order whose main aim is to continually devalue their money and therefore their buying power. And they must scorn a currency that has gone whichever way the wind has blown ever since it was unpegged from gold following the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreements at the start of the 1970s. These libertarians – the very same who in the US are the most ardent gun supporters – now swear only by Bitcoin that they have deemed to be more reliable than the gold standard that was itself too, after all, the upshot of political choices and of a system built around a central bank, productivity, creditors and debtors – in short, structures.

However, it doesn’t produce anything, Bitcoin. It has strictly no physical or material form. It has no involvement in business or property. It doesn’t generate revenue, nor does it pay interest or dividends. Bitcoin can only be measured against itself, compared only to itself since no reference index can tell us if its value is in line with its economic reality, for the simple reason that the latter just doesn’t exist. In fact, no one, no analyst, investor or speculator has been able to demonstrate or explain if this digital creation that is Bitcoin is overvalued or undervalued. Because Bitcoin has no value, just a price, that is determined by the hordes of players who are trying to promote it and by others who are selling it to make a profit while they still can. You might have seen it, that the very essence of Bitcoin is that its price can fluctuate between zero and…infinity, because its nature is such that it is impossible to set a limit to its price, even theoretically. Its price can easily jump by a hundred times in the space of 48 hours with no real ramifications and without any monetary effect on the economy, but simply because it is a casino that’s sucking in more and more players.

The price of Bitcoin at any given moment in time is therefore just a number that has no basis. And this same price can become zero without the real world or economy being affected by it. Only those who still possess it will be the losers because no one has any need for Bitcoin, except for the gamblers and speculators who refuse to admit the purely artificial nature of how its price is arrived at. Bitcoin is, in truth, not a monetary phenomenon but merely the most recent creation of this neoliberalism that keeps on spewing out speculation and inflating bubbles in the hope of increasing profits, with losing everything as a side effect.