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Digital Currencies Will Be National
Why Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all the other blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies will be completely irrelevant by 2030
Today naïve individuals, excitable investors, and anxious fund managers are continuing to stock up on Bitcoin and its competitors in the belief that (a) everything with the word blockchain is magic, and (b) that independent cryptocurrencies are the way of the future despite their appalling inefficiency and profligate energy consumption that amplifies the problem of climate change.
Although regrettably the cryptocurrency bubble will likely burst before someone with a keen sense of humor floats TulipCoin on the market, it is nevertheless equally likely that digital currencies are indeed the way of the future.
Only not in the way nearly everyone presently imagines.
Governments are getting into the digital currency game.
For the hopelessly naïve believers in “government-free money” this move is antithetical to everything they imagine to be true about conventional cryptocurrencies, much as moving off the gold standard was antithetical to those who imagined that value should magically be anchored to a lump of metal that’s not much good for anything. But while tulip-currencies like Bitcoin are…