My Thanksgiving was full of good cheer, as I expected. The food followed the usual script: The dark meat was better than the white… the stuffing was better than the mashed potatoes… and the pies were amazingly good.
What was different? A new topic dominated the conversation.
Yep, you guessed it: cryptocurrency.
I sat next to Johnny, one of my favorite people and a really smart dude. I don’t see him too often. I live in Maryland and he lives in Virginia. He commutes to Texas every week, working for a global energy company. His specialty is oil. This week he’s in London. Next week, who knows?
We began talking oil, then North Sea oil, then Norway’s huge oil windfall, then its $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, grown this large thanks to oil revenues. At this point, I commented, “It’s going to be interesting to see whether the fund will invest in bitcoin, some other cryptocurrency or a blockchain-based company.”
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The Case Against Bitcoin
Johnny said, “Those cryptocoins? They’re awfully risky, aren’t they? Why would the government of Norway invest in those?”
Johnny was just getting started. He proceeded to cover the entire spectrum of reasons why he wasn’t buying into that “crazy crypto bug.”
When he stopped, he looked at me in anticipation of… what? A fierce counter-offense? A point-by-point refutation? Anything I could tell him about cryptocurrency that would change his mind right there and then?
Well, none of that happened. Instead, I said, “You’re mostly right.” And I meant it.
When he said that bitcoin was new and largely unproven, he was mostly right. Compared to gold, it was born a minute ago. Compared to most fiat currencies, bitcoin is still in its infancy.
On the other hand, it’s proven to help millions of people who use it to transfer money. It’s a proven store of value to millions of users trapped in countries with runaway inflation, like Venezuela.
