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18 Jan, 2018 13:47

If you like casinos, you’ll love bitcoin – economics professor

If you like casinos, you’ll love bitcoin – economics professor

Disputes about bitcoin being a speculative bubble never seem to end. Economist Gregory Clark, who talked to RT on the sidelines of the Gaidar Economic Forum in Moscow, thinks the virtual currency is “incredibly insecure.”

“I’m afraid I have to join the opinion that bitcoin is just another huge bubble,” said Clark, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He said the major problem with bitcoin is that “If you think about it as a currency, it has some very bad properties. For a currency you would want something that has stable value.”

The economist has called bitcoin “incredibly insecure,” saying he knows a number of people who lost their bitcoin because they forgot the digital code giving them access to it. “And now the money is gone forever,” he said, explaining that bitcoin is not like having money in a bank, which could actually recover your account if you forget the details.

“I’m afraid I have to join the majority of economists who say that if you want to go to a casino, bitcoin is the convenient place to go,” said Clark.

According to the professor, if you look at the history of bitcoin prices, it’s been wildly swinging all throughout. With every cycle, there have been people predicting its demise or that bitcoin is coming back or finding a stable value.

One important thing we could learn is that “if you want a stable value currency, you would not have anything to do with bitcoin,” Clark said. “But there are some people who want excitement in their lives and those people, I think, will find it’s another type of casino where they can have a lot of fun, watching the value (of bitcoin) fluctuate from day to day.”

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section

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