Are the economists in academia learning anything from the various cryptocurrencies in circulation or have these new currencies played out exactly as previous theories on economics would suggest, and it’s all very old hat?
There’s nothing hugely surprising. Things played out well within the range of reasonable expectation among the money peeps. I would guess the value increased faster the generally expected, but there’s nothing in theory that can lead to a reliable prediction for value in a case like this.
For an example, you can see what I was saying three years ago. Holds up pretty well. Maybe a few errors, but they stem from a slight misunderstanding of the technical specs, not from faulty theory. At the time I didn’t appreciate the nature of the block chain and how large it would get, nor the wasted resources in the race-to-the-bottom nature of the mining. I saw it as a fun toy, and it is, but this toy has turned out to be more costly than I originally thought. I also overestimated how often it could be used for transactions. There’s absolutely no way to use it on the same scale as, say, Visa cards. But I still got the primary use exactly right. I said it was like an electronic gold, and I still think that cuts precisely to the heart of what it is.