Billionaire tech executive Michael Saylor has called bitcoin “the seminal invention of the human race.” His website describes it as “a bank in cyberspace”...
A recent survey found that 16% of Americans have used cryptocurrency in some way, mostly as a speculative investment, not to pay for goods and services.7:00 AM on Jan 17, 2022 CST
Nearly 30,000 bitcoin ATMs now dot the American landscape in gas stations, liquor stores and hair salons, up from 1,800 four years ago. About half of Coinstar’s 17,000 kiosks, which convert coins into cash, now sell bitcoin. And consumers have a growing array of options for buying, selling and transmitting the digital currency, including popular payment apps such as Venmo and Cash App.
Within bitcoin, the original and still largest cryptocurrency, only a tenth of transactions amount to any “economically meaningful” activity, according to an October study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And of that slice, the study concluded that traders aiming to buy low and sell high accounted for the vast majority of moves.
Indeed, the top 10,000 individual investors in bitcoin own roughly a third of all digital tokens in circulation, the NBER research found, a greater concentration of wealth than exists with dollars among the richest American households. In the second quarter of last year, transactions over $10 million accounted for more than 60% of activity in the growing decentralized finance market, the crypto-enabled alternative to traditional financial services, according to a report by Chainalysis.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who recently quit the social media giant, predicts that bitcoin will replace the dollar and become the world’s “single currency” within the decade. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has encountered its own challenges to its crypto ambitions. The social media giant sought to become a digital payments juggernaut in 2019, revealing plans to launch a cryptocurrency that would let users exchange money with no transaction fees. But concern among federal regulators that the product could pose risks to the financial system so far has hobbled the project. David Marcus, the executive in charge of it, left the company late last year.