HuffPuff Hit Piece on Bitcoin Is Laughably Inept
Gotta say, I usually don't expect a very high bar of fact checking, or intelligence, in HuffPuff articles, but this POS by Zach Carter is a new low.
a) Bitcoin has not only created millionaires, but billionaires. The Winklevoss twins, for instance, are bitcoin billionaires.
b) claiming that "cryptocurrency" has no real meaning only demonstrates your lack of literacy and complete lack of knowledge of the field or technology.
c) The Federal Reserve Notes (i.e. what you think of as "dollars" but aren't actually) in your pocket mimic the function of real money. Under the US Constitution, only gold and silver are real money. Bitcoin was designed to mathematically replicate the macroeconomic behavior of gold currency in an economy. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever be minted, and its scarcity is enforced by cryptographic protocols, and math (but I know you journalists don't math, so your ignorance is understandable), so if you believe 2 + 2 = 4, then bitcoin is an unforgeably scarce digital good with intrinsic value. This is a mathematically provable statement.
d) Commodities do not need to be material or made of matter. Sunlight, daylight, electricity, space, and time are all tradable commodities. Most of these are actively traded on commodities exchanges already.
e) political approval has never been a hallmark of economic legitimacy.
f) The only reason corporations are sitting on trillions in profits is because the US has the highest capital gains tax rates in the world, so they are leaving that money overseas where they can reinvest it at much lower tax rates. This is how the free market works. If you want that money to improve the lives of productive Americans, lower the tax rates so they can bring it home and invest it in creating more American jobs and growing our economy.
Zach claims to be a political economy reporter. Perhaps he should actually study some actual economics, other than Das Kapital.