Three cheers to the mod who changed the title from "Bitcoin is Evil", even though that's what NYT wants to call it. The author spends most of the piece explicitly telling us that he will not be making a morality judgement about the currency.
One quote in the article caught my eye:
> BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.
Fun thought exercise: replace "BitCoin" with "cash." Businesses across the country choose to have a cash-only policy (or destroy receipts, avoid use of electronic records, and so on) to avoid paying taxes and having their transactions monitored. That's not to say this is wise or ethical behavior, but it certainly happens, even without cryptocurrency. So why do critics describe BTC as a libertarian threat and in-person cash transfers as normal?
I don't know enough about economics to know if it's possible to "de-politicize" it, separate a theorist from a particular type of government. But I perceive that Krugman, master of his intellectual domain, becomes deranged in the presence of the name "bitcoin" because technological innovations don't go in reverse, and disruptive ones change the facts on the ground. In those circumstances all government can do is either accept it or go full-on North Korea. In his world, the state must have at least the power, even if it must only judiciously decide when to apply it, to direct all human activity to maintain stability and order. If bitcoin really does threaten the power of the state to tax, the government's reaction is going to turn his utopian social contract "we're-all-in-it-together" paradise into a dystopian surveillance hell-state. and he, as the cheerleader of the State (if anyone remembers him) goes from being a good guy to a bad guy. I can understand how then that bitcoin presents a scary proposition.
I don't know how closely he's been paying attention to the rest of the news on how the government has been reacting to things on the Internet it can't control, like encrypted communications, but the government isn't taking the "acceptance" route, it's going the North Korea route. If he wrote a "PGP is evil" article about how it destroys the ability of the State to keep tabs on pedophiles and terrorists and tax cheaters, it would be derided here with a lot more force.
One quote in the article caught my eye:
> BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.
Fun thought exercise: replace "BitCoin" with "cash." Businesses across the country choose to have a cash-only policy (or destroy receipts, avoid use of electronic records, and so on) to avoid paying taxes and having their transactions monitored. That's not to say this is wise or ethical behavior, but it certainly happens, even without cryptocurrency. So why do critics describe BTC as a libertarian threat and in-person cash transfers as normal?