If cryptocurrencies are a bubble
Crypto currencies are a bubble. Even if they were the best idea in the world, the massive zoom up in price over the last year shows that they're a bubble. Something that isn't even vaguely stable in price, is no use as a means of exchange.
(and there's plenty of evidence showing that they're simply Banking 2.0, with adoption accelerating every day)
Where? Is adoption increasing? Steam just pulled out of Bitcoin saying that transactions were taking an hour to process and costing $20. Reports I've read since suggest that's only got worse.
Anyway Bitcoin isn't Banking 2.0. It might just possibly be transaction processing 2.0 - it isn't, but you can dream. But it doesn't even approach all the other services that banking provides. Banking is about liquidity transformation - turning short term savings into long term loans - everything else in banking is just database work and customer service.
Bitcoin as investment looks to me to be killing Bitcoin as currency. Maybe after the inevitable price collapse it could go back to "normal", as it did after the last major collapse you mentioned.
But it's still a piddling amount of money/transactions in the whole Bitcoin ecosystem, that it's failing to deal with. International banking deals with massively more transactions far more cheaply. It only costs £10 for an instant CHAPS transfer to buy your house in the UK, and same-day BACS (up to £20k I think) is free, as most are on free-banking, and business are only pay a few pence.
it will take a hell of a lot more than the closure of a shady, two-bit British outfit to collapse something like Bitcoin.
That's true. Though Bitcoin's history shows that most/all of its exchanges seem to be shady, and the ones that grow to be the biggest tend to go bust after a while (for various reasons). That's a huge problem if you're foolish enough to invest in Bitcoin, as you've got to find a trustworthy exchange to get your money out with. And come the inevitable collapse of the bubble, they'll probably start dropping like flies.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
