As they enter the financial mainstream, cryptocurrencies present both investors and consumers with new kinds of dangers.
I have long been a crypto skeptic, but as it worms its way into America’s financial infrastructure, it is getting harder and harder for me to maintain the argument that it will crash and burn. So I have revised my opinion. Crypto does have a future — as a speculative asset that enhances risk for gamblers, the paranoid, and less sophisticated investors, all the while diverting capital from more productive uses.
See? I told you I had changed my mind.
Something about crypto has never sat well with me. It contradicts everything I understood about money: It is volatile and hard to use, and it solves a problem there is already a better solution for: Government-issued money is pretty great. Even stablecoins, which could become a viable means of payment with new federal regulation authorized by the law President Donald Trump signed last week, can’t match the dollar.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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