06 Dec 2013 / Business Insider – No one knows for sure whether Bitcoin is a currency or a means of transferring funds.
In his new note on Bitcoin, Bank of America Merrill Lynch currency analyst David Woo buys into the argument from Bitcoin evangelists that the digital currency can be both.
And in discussing its value as a means for wiring money, Woo goes big.
Some background: When discussing Bitcoin’s potential value, people often use the example of a migrant worker in the U.S. using Bitcoin as an alternative means to send remittances home. There are no known examples of this happening yet — as with many things bitcoin, this is pure speculation — but it’s technically possible.
There is also speculation that this use is one of the reasons for bitcoin’s extreme growth in China, since the country’s capital controls make it difficult to perform transactions overseas using yuan.
So Woo draws up a very bullish comparison between bitcoin and Western Union, MoneyGram, and Euronet, the world’s largest wire transfer companies. He frames it in the context of those companies’ market cap (or enterprise value, which includes debt), and compares it to Bitcoin’s market cap, which is now $13 billion…… Read more
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
