I’ve seen another surge in the bad Bitcoin news recently. There’s a lot of talk about the lack of scalability of the technology; I came across an article the other day that cited some banker who determined that the value of Bitcoin was effectively $0; after the massive price drop before Christmas, a lot of skeptics are strutting around patting themselves on the back and warning people of the imminent collapse of the whole system.
I can’t say it’s all nonsense. Especially on the question of scalability, there are real concerns about how the structure of Bitcoin will continue to allow for the exponential growth that we saw through the last quarter of 2017.
But I think it’s worth considering that there are a lot of people who have a very strong vested interest in doing everything they can to inhibit or slow down the progress of decentralized currencies, and decentralization in general. The entire centralized system that has been set up over the past two centuries with the creation of nation-states governed by massive centralized governments, and the creation of centralized financial institutions that control trillions of dollars worth of capital is threatened by the ongoing revolution brought about by blockchain technology. Putting power, privacy, and autonomy back in the hands of individual people, especially when it comes to money and politics, is a direct threat to the very institutions that we have grown to accept as a normal part of human society.
And they are not going to just sit around and let it happen. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, is not a fool; he realizes that the decentralization of the financial industry is bad news for one of the largest banks in America.
When bankers go on national television and ensure everyone that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, worthless, and undeserving of attention, it’s important to take their words with a grain of salt.
After all, it’s the biggest threat to their jobs that they’ve ever faced and not likely to go away anytime soon.