Media Coverage of Bitcoin Is Still a Total Disaster
A recent Washington Post article shows how journalists get cryptocurrency wrong
I ’m fed up with journalists who are either ignorant or unwilling to learn about cryptocurrency holding forth on its perceived weaknesses. Recently, the Washington Post published a piece entitled “Bitcoin is still a disaster” by economic affairs reporter Matt O’Brien, which I feel relies on mistaken assumptions to paint a misleading picture of the world. Today, I’d like to engage with some of the claims made in the piece, and show how O’Brien — among many others — get it wrong.
Claim: Currencies are meant to be stable
“There’s one thing a currency is supposed to do that bitcoin never has. That’s maintain a stable value.”
This assumes that bitcoin is a currency, and that the definition of currency is normative (“x should do y”) as opposed to descriptive (“things of type x have the qualities y and z”). I’d classify Bitcoin the protocol as a complete monetary system, and bitcoin the unit of value as a commodity money, which has the potential to become a gold-like reserve currency. Commodities fluctuate — that’s what they do.
