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Professor Kevin Dowd is Still Skeptical about Bitcoin




When Professor Kevin Dowd, a professor of Economics and Finance at Durham University, wrote a piece titled “Bitcoin is bust: Why investors should abandon the doomed cryptocurrency,” a lot of debate took place whether this libertarian and fierce advocate of private money over government-issued and controlled alternatives was right.

However, those who opposed him have not been able to convince him that Bitcoin is a complete private currency. Professor Kevin Dowd had argued that the role of miners reintroduces trust into the system putting it at risk of monopolistic practices and economies of scale. Nonetheless, he recognizes the frailties of Bitcoin in its current form.
He says that Bitcoin is a continuing evolution to be endangering its innovative principles. Answering to the question whether he considers Bitcoin as private money, he says that it has certainly been private (up to now) but Bitcoin does not satisfy all the classical features of money that can place it as complete private money.

According to Professor Kevin Dowd Bitcoin is a means of payment but does not function too well as a store of value, and definitely not a universally accepted medium of exchange. At the same time he makes it clear that on balance, he would be happy to regard it as private money wouldn’t want to argue the toss on mostly semantic issues.

BitLicense are Kiss of Death as They Defeat the Whole Purpose of Bitcoin

He says that Bitcoin itself proves that the notion of money is evolving, as it should and according to him he likes the fact that Bitcoin is a privately issued and a (mostly, still) unregulated currency. However, he thinks it is losing its key attractions: its decentralization, its anonymity, and its freedom from regulation.

Nonetheless, he admits that he has tried to address these issues in his papers, presentations and blog postings. However, the hard questions for Bitcoiners like are these key attractions, Bitcoin’s value proposition, intact and likely to remain so? And if not, why continue to use it? etc. have been put by him as well.

Regarding the regulations i.e. BitLicense in NY, he says that these are a kiss of death as according to him once the government gets users in its snare in such matters, there is no escape. Also, he believes that Bitcoin going mainstream (i.e., in the regulatory sense) kills the whole point of it.


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