What price Bitcoin?

Researchers writing in the International Journal of Financial Engineering and Risk Management, hope to reveal the differences in perception of the digital, or crypto, currency between experts and members of the public.

Spyros Papathanasiou and Dimitrios Balios of the Department of Economics at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, working with Nikolaos Papamatthaiou of EPAS OAED in Lamia, anticipate that Bitcoin will ultimately be used in everyday life. At present, there are subtleties that may be obvious to experts but entirely overlooked by the public. Their survey of experts and laypeople suggest that the public sees Bitcoin as mainly a means to carry out secure transactions and payments. This is in marked contrast to expert opinion where Bitcoin is seen primarily as an investment vehicle.

Digital currencies began to have a serious impact on world economies as the US financial crisis of 2007 deepened and spread to the rest of the world resulting in serious recession, bankruptcies, and bailouts the following year and through the following decade. Indeed, a public increasingly disgruntled with political measures to remedy the recession, such as austere budgets, and the multi-billion bailouts of financial institutions might also be to blame for the rise of populism in politics. Regardless, the reliance on anonymous, decentralized monetary systems coincides with this need to increasingly protect oneself and one’s assets and resources even at the expense of others makes a cryptic currency an obvious, to the experts, way forward for investing. It is essentially off-limits to prying governmental or commercial eyes and also beyond the reach of conventional tax authorities.

Cryptocurrencies represented a negligible fraction of global wealth for a period after their invention, their net value is now perhaps several hundred billion dollars, if not more. The researchers describe the most well-known of these cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, as offering “the promise of a better financial system with anonymous transactions that are free from banks and government intervention.” They add that “Bitcoin may be the greatest change to the current economic environment in relation to our perception about money, investments, means of transactions and payments.”

Papathanasiou, S., Papamatthaiou, N. and Balios, D.P. (2019) ‘Bitcoin as an alternative digital currency: exploring the publics’ perception vs. experts’, Int. J. Financial Engineering and Risk Management, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.146–171.