Cryptocurrencies need carefully targeted regulation
Add BT as a preferred sourceINVESTORS will remember 2017 as having been yet another banner year for Bitcoin, the price of which has soared more than 1,800 per cent between January and Dec 26. But despite its spectacular performance, the cryptocurrency has come under scathing criticism, including from some highly respectable quarters.
In September, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon dismissed Bitcoin as "a fraud". Last month, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz declared that Bitcoin serves "no useful social function", is mostly used for criminal activities and "should be outlawed". Other critics have variously labelled it "a fantasy", "a Ponzi scheme" and "a collective delusion".
On the other hand, Bitcoin enthusiasts have furiously defended the cryptocurrency on the grounds that it is not created or controlled by governments but by computer algorithms - and therefore, cannot be manipulated; that it enables secure and low-cost fund transfers between people without intermediaries like banks or credit card companies; and that unlike currency notes, it can never be counterfeited.
