Where next for the world of Bitcoin?

The world of Bitcoin and indeed all the other altcoins has seen quite a reversal as 2018 has progressed. The days of “free money” have gone and they have been replaced by this according to MarketWatch.

Bitcoin is breaking all sorts of records at the moment, most of them unwanted, and in a few days it will equal a milestone not matched in four years.

Not since October of 2014 has the price of bitcoin   seen four consecutive monthly declines, and a negative close for the month of November, which now seems a foregone conclusion, would match this feat having fallen every month since August, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

So a clear change although in the fast moving world of Bitcoin it is still over ten times higher than it was back then. If anything the fall seems to be picking up the pace.

After opening November above $6,500, bitcoin is down more than 40%, and since the four-month streak began on Aug. 1, the value of the world’s most famous digital currency has more than halved.

As I type this the Bitcoin price is at US $3763.7 which is down some US $282 or a bit under 7%. I note that just to add to the confusion there is also now a Bitcoin Cash. This was created by a fork out of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin cash was one of the marvels of the bitcoin bubble. It is a fork from bitcoin. A fork of a cryptocurrency takes place when someone, anyone declares that a blockchain is going to be transferred to a new set of rules and network infrastructure. ( Forbes)

It did lead to what was free money for a while.

When the fork came out, bitcoin did not fall and bitcoin cash went through the roof rising from the low hundreds to shoot quickly above $1,000. It was free money for bitcoin holders who could get their hands on their bitcoin cash by navigating the technical issues, which were mighty. ( Forbes)

But the gains were short-lived.

The central bankers revenge

From a central banking point of view the altcoin world is a disaster as they have no power to set interest-rates and no control over the total amount of it. Even worse it bypasses “the previous” and in the bull market days saw very heavy disinflation as the price of goods and services became much cheaper. At the limit it would make them be an anachronism and then irrelevant.

John Lewis of the Bank of England put it like this on the 13th of this month.

Existing private cryptocurrencies do not seriously threaten traditional monies because they are afflicted by multiple internal contradictions. They are hard to scale, are expensive to store, cumbersome to maintain, tricky for holders to liquidate, almost worthless in theory, and boxed in by their anonymity. And if newer cryptocurrencies ever emerge to solve these problems, that’s additional downside news for the value of existing ones.

There are of course issues there but being “almost worthless in theory” is a critique that could be pointed at central bank fiat currencies which also rely on an act of faith to have value. Also the bit about new companies would have applied to the proliferation of railway companies back in the day. Whereas we know that whilst many failed the railways are still with us. Those suffering commuters who use Southern Rail may wish that they didn’t but they do.

Let us look at his paradoxes or as he might have put it seven deadly sins.

The congestion paradox

But cryptocurrency platforms are different. Their costs are largely variable, their capacity is largely fixed. Like the London Underground in rush hour, crypto platforms are vulnerable to congestion: more patrons makes them *less* attractive.

The storage paradox

Each user has to maintain their own copy of the entire transactions history, so an N-fold increase in users and transactions, means an N-squared fold increase in aggregate storage needs.

The mining paradox

Rewarding miners with new units of currency for processing transactions leads to a tension between users and miners.  This crystalises in Bitcoin’s conflict over how many transactions can be processed in a block. Miners want this kept small………But users want the exact opposite: higher capacity, lower transactions costs and more liquidity, and so favour larger block sizes.

The concentration paradox

This starts in intriguing fashion.

 97% of bitcoin is estimated to be held by just 4% of addresses, and inequality rises with each block.

However this critique is also applicable to the central banking enthusiasm for higher house prices and the “wealth effects”

An asset is valued by the market price at which it changes hands. Only a fraction of the stock is actually traded at any point in time. So the price reflects the views of the marginal market participant.

You can’t all sell at once and certainly not at that price. The list below is somewhat breathtaking in the circumstances.

But for cryptos they are much larger because i)Exchanges are illiquid ii) Some players are vast relative to the market iii) There isn’t a natural balance of buyers and sellers iv) opinion is more volatile and polarised.

As central banks have sucked liquidity of out markets with their actions, for example the Japanese government bond market has often been frozen, the opening point is a bit rich. Ditto point ii) if we look at the size of central bank balance sheets and of course there was no natural balance between buyers and sellers when they surged into markets. For example some of the recent turmoil in the Italian government bond market has been caused by the “unnatural” buying of the ECB being reduced. As to the last point, well maybe, but so many things are polarised these days.

The valuation paradox

The puzzle in economic theory is why private cryptocurrencies have any value at all.

Fiat currencies anyone?

The anonymity paradox

The (greater) anonymity which cryptocurrencies offer is generally a weakness not a strength. True, it creates a core transactions demand from money launderers , tax evaders and purveyors of illicit goods> because they make funds and transactors hard to trace.

This is both true and an attempted smear. After all the recent money laundering spree undertaken in the Baltics by customers of Danske Bank seems to have been at 200 billion Euros or so much larger than the altcoin universe in total.

Of course for a central banker it needs central bankers.

 Keep a cryptocurrency far from regulated institutions and you reduce its value, because it drastically restricts the pool of willing transactors and transactions. Bring it closer to the realm of regulated financial institutions and it increases in value.

The innovation paradox

Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that the more optimistic you are about tomorrow’s cryptocurrencies, the more pessimistic you must be about the value of today’s.

Odd though that this sort of logic is not applied to forward guidance.

Expect it to be worthless in the future, and it becomes worthless now.

Comment

There is a lot to consider here and let me start by offering some sympathy for those who did this back in the day. From CNBC.

Bitcoin is in the “mania” phase, with some people even borrowing money to get in on the action, regulator Joseph Borg said. “We’ve seen mortgages being taken out to buy bitcoin. … People do credit cards, equity lines,” he said. Bitcoin has been soaring all year, starting out at $1,000 and rocketing above $19,000 on the Coinbase exchange last week. ( CNBC )

Hard to believe that was the 11th of December last year as it feels like a lifetime ago. Also yes I do feel sorry for them even though it was pretty stupid. A fortnight or so earlier we were looking at some of the issues above.

That statement is true of pretty much every price although of course some have backing via assets or demand. So often we see a marginal price used to calculate a total based on an average price that is not known………This leaves us with the issue of how Bitcoin functions as a store of money which depends on time. Today’s volatility shows that over a 24 hour period it clearly fails and yet if we extend the time period so far at least it has worked rather well as one.

As to the store of value function that still holds as early buyers have still done really rather well but more recent ones have taken a bath and a cold one at that. Looking ahead it does not look as though the market has capitulated enough to find the ground to rally, But in the background there are still flickers of good news.

Ohio appears set to become the first state to accept bitcoin for tax bills, a show of support for a technology that has garnered lots of hype but failed to gain traction as a form of payment. ( WSJ)