Tribune. Monetary history is crossed by experiments, developments and… backtracking. Hidden under technical clothes, certain “innovations” are in reality dangerous regressions. This was the case, for example, with the Coinage Act of 1873 in the United States. This law confirmed the abandonment of bimetallism by restricting the monetary use of silver for the sole benefit of gold, supposedly in order to protect the value of money. The result was a reduction in the money supply and a great economic depression. Today, a new danger awaits us: the fascination with bitcoin, described as“Digital gold”.
Because if gold is definitely a “Barbarian relic”, according to the expression of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) – the yellow metal no longer exercises more than a role of store of value – its version 2.0 is certainly not more useful, but it is more dangerous. Bitcoin has certainly played a key role in the rise of blockchain, this digital system of certification and security of exchanges, but it is developing today without it. That aside, it becomes a danger for the monetary, financial system and even for equality between citizens.
Let us recall first of all that in twelve years of existence, that is to say an infinite duration in the digital age, it is still only used for a tiny number of non-speculative transactions. In 1945, in ruined post-war Berlin, it did not take two weeks for cigarettes to spread to almost every possible transaction. Bitcoin does not finance anything economically and socially useful and does not allow any concerted monetary creation for a specific purpose (such as financing the expenses of the ecological transition).
Unlike large payment systems like Visa or Mastercard, its technical interface is in any case incapable of managing several hundred thousand transactions simultaneously. If it wanted to be money, bitcoin has clearly failed. And it cannot be, because of the erratic fluctuations of its course. In terms of monetary alternative, the added value of bitcoin compared to the existing one is zero.
Fiscal and market fragmentation
Would bitcoin at least serve as a tool in the fight against the weakening of the currency, caused by excessive money creation? This is a nice paradox: this speculative asset, essentially living off the expansionist policies of central banks, would be anti-inflationary. However, it owes the growth of its course only to its ability to divert hundreds of billions of euros from the real economy for speculative reasons. It therefore contributes to the inflation of financial products, and it is deflationary for the real economy: it is the worst possible configuration for healthy economic development. According to Chainanalysis, nearly 98.7% of bitcoin transactions are done for the purpose of speculation, not transaction.
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