Niall Ferguson, Columnist

Crypto and the Dollar Are Partners, Not Rivals

The disruptions of Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have shown the strength of the Western system and the weakness of China’s.

May 1, 2022 at 7:00 AM UTC

By Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

Teaming up.
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

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“My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace.” That’s what Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter Inc. chief executive and now head of the digital payments company Block Inc., said about Bitcoin at a webinar in July 2021.

It is more likely that war creates a bigger global appetite for Bitcoin. Times of tumult are often associated with monetary transformations. A classic example is the way, in the time of the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War, the English monetary system was fundamentally altered.