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participants to verify and audit transactions inexpensively.” One small step for man, one giant leap for accountants! The blockchain is a tremendous, life-changing innovation – if you’re a CPA. Throw those green eyeshades in the air! Dance around your spreadsheets with wild abandon! Yes, the blockchain is confusing, but what it is, even more so, is boring. However, it’s also supposed to be secret and secure. I don’t think so. There is the cryptocurrency “blooper reel” to be considered: In 2013, the Chinese bitcoin trading platform GBL suddenly shut down – a $5 million “bitcon.” In 2014, the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange declared bankruptcy after “losing” $473 million worth of customers’ bitcoins. ( Did Gox look under the couch cushions ?) In 2015, a cryptocurrency called Paycoin was offered through something called “ZenPortal.” In a Zen-like experience, 10,000 clients were left to meditate on being freed from the worldly burden of having $19 million. In 2016, the founder of the Florida cryptocurrency market Cryptsy was accused of misappropriating millions of dollars and then fleeing to China, perhaps to go to work for GBL. And then, $53 million in Ethereum
I’m more worried about government abusing its police powers than I am about individuals abusing their purchasing powers.
cryptocurrency disappeared from Ethereum’s “Decentralized Autonomous Organization,” which turned out to be a little too decentralized and autonomous to qualify as being organized. But let’s chalk that up to experience. What’s half a billion dollars among virtual friends? Every new technological development has its missteps. Such as the time inventor Thomas Edison electrocuted Topsy the elephant to prove that alternating current is more dangerous than direct current. (Edison’s actual involvement in frying Topsy may be, like the security of your cryptocurrency account, dubious. But it’s one of those stories – such as Cryptocurrency Is the Money of the Future – that we journalists call “too good to check.”) Cryptocurrency on the World Wide Web does not create monetary security or secrecy. Money has always involved insecurities and secrets. Banditry, after all, was invented long before cash was. When we were trading goats for pigs, it was hard to hide them under a mattress. They squeal and bleat. Bandits would steal the pork roast and the Libyan hamburger.
American Consequences | 9
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