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Paul Krugman | A Virtual Currency Raises Real-World Questions

Paul Krugman: “Almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has centered on positive economics – can this actually work? And I have to say that I’m still deeply unconvinced.”

It’s always important, and always hard, to distinguish positive economics (how things work) from normative economics (how things should be). Indeed, with many of the macroeconomics issues I’ve written about, it has been obvious that large numbers of economists can’t bring themselves to make that distinction; they dislike an activist government on political grounds, and this leads them to make really bad arguments about why fiscal stimulus can’t work and how monetary stimulus will be disastrous.

But I’d like to talk not about macroeconomics but about money – specifically, about Bitcoin, the virtual currency. So far, almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has centered on positive economics – can this actually work? And I have to say that I’m still deeply unconvinced.

To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value. And it remains completely unclear why Bitcoin should be a stable store of value. The economist Brad DeLong explained it earlier this month in an online article for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth:

“Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things,” he wrote. “Underpinning the value of the dollar is a combination of (a) the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the U.S. government, and (b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2 percent/year.”

He continued: