Opinion | Bubble, Bubble, Fraud and Trouble<br />And while most of us can go years without seeing a $100 bill, there are a lot of those bills out there — more<br />than a trillion dollars’ worth, accounting for 78 percent of the value of U. S. currency in circulation.<br />There’s really no reason to use Bitcoin in transactions — unless you don’t want anyone to see either what you’re buying<br />or what you’re selling, which is why much actual Bitcoin use seems to involve drugs, sex and other black-market goods.<br />As Robert Shiller, the world’s leading bubble expert, points out, asset bubbles are like “naturally occurring Ponzi schemes.”<br />Early investors in a bubble make a lot of money as new investors are drawn in, and those profits pull in even more people.<br />Like Bitcoins, $100 bills aren’t much use for ordinary transactions: Most shops won’t accept them.<br />When it comes to cryptocurrencies there’s an additional factor: It’s a bubble,<br />but it’s also something of a cult, whose initiates are given to paranoid fantasies about evil governments stealing all their money (as opposed to private hackers, who have stolen a remarkably high proportion of extant cryptocurrency tokens).<br />Although the modern dollar is a “fiat” currency, not backed by any other asset, like gold, its value is ultimately backed by the fact<br />that the U. S. government will accept it, in fact demands it, in payment for taxes.
