Bitcoin — boom or bubble?
The baffling Bitcoin boom is either an exercise in self-delusion — a high-tech Ponzi scheme that will come crashing down — or an imaginative new Internet technology that could change how millions of people around the world conduct everyday business. There is little middle ground.
Called a “digital currency,” Bitcoin originated in early 2009 with a software program written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Who is Nakamoto? Good question. It’s a pseudonym, and we don’t know who’s behind it — whether man or woman; individual or group; American, Japanese, Russian or some other nationality. But what seems clear is that Nakamoto owns bitcoins worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Jerry Brito, an analyst at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University and a Bitcoin enthusiast.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-is-bitcoin-for-real-or-a-fad/2014/01/19/8c04af9e-7f9e-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html
