Three cheers for Jemima Kelly for maintaining her wholly justified scepticism about bitcoin (“Crypto may have become boring, but it still isn’t legit”, Opinion, January 29) and none at all for Larry Fink, whose new found enthusiasm for crypto seems to have led him to . . . well, alchemy.
Like some latter-day Paracelsus, the BlackRock chief executive told CNBC: “Unlike gold where we manufacture new gold, we’re almost at the ceiling of the amount of bitcoin that can be created.” We cannot “manufacture new gold”, we can only mine it from finite deposits (as we “mine” bitcoin).
Personally, I think gold is ludicrously overpriced but it does have genuine uses (in the jewellery and electronic industries), a long (if contested) history as a store of value, and it is just possible that it will serve as a useful means of exchange in some post-nuclear, apocalyptic, dystopian nightmare, whereas bitcoin will lose all value once the internet goes down — as it will do in such a scenario.
As Kelly puts it so neatly: “The truth is that, whether the crypto is encased in a nice regulated wrapper and sold to you by BlackRock, or whether you buy it from a pastor who says that the Lord told him to make the sale, there is still no there there.”
Perhaps we should make it four cheers for Jemima Kelly’s piece.
Jonathan Allum
Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK
