Regular readers of FT Alphaville may have formed the impression that its current and former writers are united in scepticism about crypto in general and bitcoin in particular. This is correct.
FTAV posts between June 2011 and today may have communicated the idea that bitcoin is a negative-sum game being played on a protocol that’s very clever and hypothetically useful as a unit of account, but is chronically inefficient as a conventional means of exchange and is compromised as a store of value. Our posts may also have promoted the idea that the price of a bitcoin is an arbitrary hype gauge that’s disconnected with any utility the token may have, because it’s trivial to duplicate the utility provided by said token, so any intrinsic worth comes from the sunk costs of built infrastructure alongside intangibles like regulatory acquiescence, interconnectedness with mainstream financial systems it was once sold as being the antidote to, and the souvenir attraction of “being the first”.
We stand by every single one of those posts.