I am not one of those economists who has been looking down his nose at Bitcoin from the start. As I argued back in 2013, I think the condescension that some economists bring to the topic of Bitcoin is an instinctive dismissal of anything with a whiff of anti-central banking. I have believed my friend Tim Lee when he argued Bitcoin is something worth thinking about for economists. Yet the Bitcoin bubble is now screaming too loudly to ignore. And it has revealed flaws about the cryptocurrency that I think will keep it from being more widely embraced as a currency and unit of exchange.
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