Cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible—a boon for con-artists. Ponzi schemes are common, as is incompetence
,” said the ads for CoinCorner, a cryptocurrency exchange. They appeared on London’s Underground last summer, featuring a cheery pensioner who had, apparently, bought Bitcoins in just ten minutes. It was bad advice. Six months earlier a single Bitcoin cost just under $20,000. By the time the ads appeared, its value had fallen to $7,000. These days, it is just $4,025 .
Of that, Ms Grauer reckons, only a fraction was used to buy things. Around $2.4bn went to merchant-service providers, which handle payments for businesses—a piffling sum compared with the $15trn of transactions in 2017 on Alipay and WeChat Pay, two Chinese payment apps. Darknet markets, which sell stolen credit-card details, recreational drugs, cheap medicines and the like, made up $605m, and gambling sites $857m. Most of the rest was related to speculation.
Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, wanted it to be resistant to control by tyrannical governments and banks. Payment records are therefore not held centrally, but broadcast to all users. A new batch of Bitcoin is issued every ten minutes on average. That limits the network to processing about seven transactions per second . In 2017, as the crypto-bubble was inflating, the system became clogged.
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