“There has been so much coverage of the Bitcoin phenomenon that you might think that most people (at least in the financial technology world) have a grasp of how it works and what the key issues are.
Once you start talking to those who have been following it a bit longer, however, the conversation can start to take on a geeky one-upmanship aspect pretty quickly: one party will say Bitcoin is “just the poster child” for a whole set of crypto currencies, the other will cite the Dutch tulip and dismiss them all as speculative bubbles, which the next will deny by pointing out that the US Treasury has deemed Bitcoin equivalent to property for tax purposes.
The conversation will spiral on through the suitability of crypto currencies for legitimate business, one side claiming that their ‘anonymous’ nature means that they are suitable only for money laundering and other dubious activities, the other pointing out that the underlying mechanism is far from anonymous. At the Money20/20 conference in the US last year, one representative of a US law enforcement agency expressed a preference for money launderers to use Bitcoin because they would be easier to catch given the audit trail built into the blockchain that is at the heart of all crypto currencies.”
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