31 Dec 2013 / RT – Like it or love it, bitcoin has been a constant theme of headlines for the past year, as 2013 marked its coming of age.
Last year’s nerd money fad has become this year’s most talked about product.
Ultimately, nature abhors a vacuum and with western political leadership an increasingly distant memory, citizens are becoming increasingly restive about the parlous state of financial governance. Throughout the West, the ravages of quantitative easing [QE] have helped the wealthiest prosper, while ordinary citizens have struggled through a grinding economic plight, which has left voters feeling increasingly abandoned by government.
Into this void has stepped something which had been mooted for many years: a popular electronic currency. Bitcoin is filling a gap self-interested central bankers are keen to suggest doesn’t need filling. Establishment media has been wrong-footed as the Copernican Revolution in finance creates not just bitcoin but a series of parallel financial universes where independent money is at the center of commerce, as opposed to government manipulated fiat currency.
Meanwhile, bitcoin may not be the cryptocurrency the world uses in a decade and the biannual obituaries may yet prove right! As 2013 concluded, BTC’s value had multiplied albeit off its highs after the Bank of China endeavored to close the door to the threat of a backdoor floatation of the renminbi.
In reality, BTC is still remarkably small – growing exponentially from about 142 million dollars to circa 8 billion by Christmas. In other words, the total value of bitcoin amounts to the annual GDP of the Bahamas. Clearly bitcoin isn’t economically significant, yet. However, it now has its first ATM and many have bought beers, lattes and even homes with BTC this past year.
Naturally bankers of all shades are scared of losing their monopolist grip on money, yet given the vast inefficiency of their decrepit systems, it is probably already too late. Decentralized money is an idea whose time has come. Bitcoin is the breakthrough currency creating a widespread consciousness that there is an alternative to holding greenbacks, or lugging a trunk full of gold around….. Read more
http://rt.com/op-edge/the-year-of-bitcoin-722/
