Government's requirement to pay it's taxes in a currency of choice is what gives money it's long term value. There is no similar multi trillion dollar demand awaiting e-tulip's to maintain their value.

That's not to say they will fail quickly, just they need different supports.

That argument has been abused too :) Maybe you are right but my hunch is USD would still be valuable if the US government would accept multiple currencies for taxes.

Yes, interesting because the comments are not just coming from an internet blow-hard.

Instead they're coming from someone with vested interest in delegitimizing cryptocurrencies.

Why would they have a vested interest? If they felt it was a good way to make money they'd be all over it.

They are already interested in smart contracts, when I was working with them last year I went to a presentation on ethereum and how interesting it is.

It's the speculative nature of BTC and other coins that he seems to be commenting on.

>Why would they have a vested interest? If they felt it was a good way to make money they'd be all over it.

Because blockchain based currencies like Bitcoin cannot be controlled or manipulated by large entities who have ingrained themselves into the system like a traditional fiat banking system. You can't just create Bitcoin out of thin air and for financial mammoths like JP Morgan who contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis because of irresponsible lending/banking practices, it scares them.

I see BTC as being no different to trading stocks, some days you lose and some days you win.

> You can't just create Bitcoin out of thin air

What do you think miners are doing? And with ICOs you can literally just print however many you want.

> I see BTC as being no different to trading stocks, some days you lose and some days you win.

Sure, but with stocks there's usually a company actually doing something.

Mines put in work. Jpm can/does create wealth by moving figures around on reports, or by betting one asset against another, without any physical limitation on its actions.

"Moving figures around on a report" is capital allocation. The history of the 20th century suggests this is a valuable and non-trivial activity.

> Mines put in work.

It's lost work though, and the amount of work is governed only by the level of competition with other miners, rather than the amount of effort involved insome external task.

> Jpm can/does create wealth by moving figures around on reports, or by betting one asset against another, without any physical limitation on its actions.

That's somewhat beside the point.

> It's lost work though, and the amount of work is governed only by the level of competition with other miners, rather than the amount of effort involved insome external task

It's the cost of securing the network. It's not lost. Fees and rewards pay the miners for the cost of their computing cycles, to provide a secure, very difficult (near impossible) to attack network.

It's the cost of competing for block rewards, which incidentally secures the consensus, yes. It's the price of decentralisation.

And it's still not an external task, it's a facet of running the currency rather than work that is independently useful.

And it's still conjuring money out of nothing.

I think there is another simpler short term vested interest. A lot of people are moving long term savings, and stock market holdings which are managed and profitable for banks and wealth advisers to Crypto Currency that they manage themselves. And for the last couple years, they have been outperforming traditional investments.

Obviously financial advisers will be getting up to speed quickly, but for now I can't ask for ANY % of my 401k to be placed in Crypto. This means less commission and activity in the traditional investing marketplace.

> If they felt it was a good way to make money they'd be all over it.

What makes you think they're not? You don't really believe what this guy says or even believes reflects what he and his company actually does do you?

JPM exist to make money come rain or shine

I don't think they're interested in the purely speculative stuff.

I worked with them as a consultant for a year until June. Blockchain tech and smart contracts were interesting. BTC trading not so much.