Cryptocurrency's surge can only be explained by the discovery of an incredibly promising deposit of wealth. Or by the formation of a bubble.
The bitcoin is now worth over $ 10,000 . Ten times more than at the beginning of the year! Such an outbreak can only be explained by the discovery of an incredibly promising deposit of wealth. Or by the formation of a bubble, like onions of tulips in the sixteenth century, actions of the Mississippi company in the eighteenth century or runaway on all that touched the Internet late twentieth century.
The first reason is a priori excluded. Bitcoin, the decentralized electronic money circulating on computer networks, has been around for almost a decade. No major breakthrough this year can justify such a surge in prices. The second motive should be the good one: the bitcoin is a formidable bubble, which will burst one day or the other like all the bubbles.
Five reasons
There are at least five reasons for this outbreak. The first is the attraction of novelty. Not the one that appears at the birth of a product, but the one that develops after several years of diffusion, in what looks like a first maturity. We had seen such a delay with Internet values in the 1990s, or with the actions of the railways in the nineteenth century.
The second reason is the lure of gain. In financial markets where bonds pay almost nothing and shares seem expensive, many investors and savers logically want to put a small portion of their money on investments that make them dream.
The third reason, which appeared this year, is the success of the "ICO", these capital raising where actions of a new kind, the digital tokens, are sold in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ether.
Hence the fourth reason: a very strong demand on a broad-based narrow offer, less than $ 200 billion - less than a quarter of Apple's value, or the money supply of a small country.
The fifth reason, it is of another nature and can not be measured: it is the intensive use of bitcoin to make fraud or money laundering operations.
Emergence of a new monetary order
But behind these reasons, there may be a sixth, deeper one. This is the emergence of a new monetary order, radically different from that which has been established for millennia. The minting of money has always been a mark of power. Over the last three centuries, this power has been centralized by the states, which recently delegated it to central banks.
But the digital society that is starting is organized very differently. Even if their role is indispensable, the states will have a hard time resisting it - we already see it with the lifting of the tax, to which the digital giants escape a little too easily. Numerical currencies, in competition, with very different uses, undoubtedly constitute a logical component of this new world.
Central banks will of course be able to issue their own electronic currencies. But they have lost their credit in recent years, with "unconventional" policies, creating huge amounts of money to fight the damage of the financial crisis. The success of bitcoin perhaps reflects, like the surge in real estate prices, a flight from the 21st century currency.