The troubles faced by Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox are “unlikely to kill the digital currency, which has long since gone global,” Brian Patrick Eha writes for the New Yorker.
Eha notes that in the 40 nations where it’s being discussed and used, governments’ responses to Bitcoin have ranged “from outright bans to a refusal to regulate it. American consumers are now using Bitcoin to buy home goods from Overstock.com and electronics from TigerDirect. The second coming of Dutch tulip mania it is not.”
The question is not whether, but how, Bitcoin might recover from a calamity that has much in common with a financial crisis — “rampant speculation, the threatened collapse of a landmark company, the evaporation of value, a crisis of public confidence, business leaders banding together to save the day.”
Eha, who’s writing a book about Bitcoin, cites Coinapult founder Erik Voorhees, who last year predicted that “huge amounts of wealth will be created and destroyed as this new landscape is mapped out” by “a whole legion of adventurers and entrepreneurs, of risk takers, inventors and problem solvers.” Source: newyorker.com.
