Matt Levine, Columnist

Levine on Wall Street: The Magic Power of Bitcoin (and Dogecoin)

If you like cryptocurrencies there is much for you to read. Also insider trading, princelings, and Harvard Business School fleeces.

January 22, 2014 at 12:38 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Bitcoins might be useful .

I am sort of a Bitcoin skeptic, and Marc Andreessen is definitely talking his book here, but this is a pretty good articulation of how Bitcoin could have a future as a payment system. (Also, here is a Fortune piece calling it "Napster for finance," which is a mixed bag.) I think Bitcoin boosters tend to overstate some of the benefits of the Bitcoin payment system, and I still don't entirely understand why we can't just make better dollar-denominated payment systems instead of inventing a whole new currency (here is Izzy Kaminska), but to be fair Andreessen doesn't really believe much in the currency thing either. He says "Bitcoin can be used entirely as a payment system; merchants do not need to hold any Bitcoin currency or be exposed to Bitcoin volatility at any time." It's just somehow magically easier for consumers with dollars to give their dollars to merchants who want dollars if the dollars transmute briefly into Bitcoins along the way.