BITCOINS, CRYPTOCURRENCIES, AND BLOCKCHAINS

JACK CLARK FRANCIS | Professor of Economics & Finance, Bernard Baruch College, CUNY

The U.S. has approximately 1,600 cryptocurrencies. No cryptocurrency is qualified to be called money because none has been designated by the U.S. government as being legal tender. Cryptocurrencies are called virtual currencies because they possess a few of the qualities of money.

In this article, we analyze three issues related to cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin - the principal cryptocurrency
• The processes that the Federal Reserve and the central bank of Sweden are going through to evaluate the possibility of issuing some not-yet-fully-defined new form of electronic currency
• The viability of blockchain (originally introduced as an internal component of bitcoin) as a successful standalone technology