Monday, August 12, 2019

Resolution

Bitcoin is poorly suited to the purpose of becoming any nation’s main medium of exchange.

For the affirmative:

Dr. George Selgin is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Theory of Free Banking (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order (Routledge, 1996), Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (University of Michigan Press, 2008), Money: Free and Unfree (The Cato Institute, 2015), Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (The Cato Institute, 2018), and Floored! How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession (The Cato Institute 2018). Selgin holds a B.A. in economics and zoology from Drew University, and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.

For the negative:

Dr. Saifedean Ammous is the author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the first book on the economics of Bitcoin. He is Associate Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University and member of the Columbia University Center on Capitalism and Society.