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>Safe to say the Aleph blog’s David Merkel is not a fan of digital currencies.

>In his latest bearish slam lobbed at bitcoin BTCUSD, -9.22% “Where money goes to die,” he explained why he believes most of the players in the crypto market will eventually disappear along with the fortunes of late-to-the-party speculators. 

Lately Marketwatch.com has been posting a lot of articles bashing Bitcoin which makes sense because they are a wall street website but they are still giving them attention and a smart investor will do their own homework before believing something from an article so I see it as a positive for Bitcoin. 

Anyways, this article caught my eye with the ridiculous title and I want to share this guy's logic and reason behind comparing Bitcoin to Beanie Babies. Keep in mind this guy's background is in investment banking so that will help put some of his logic and reasoning to perspective.


>'At least Beanie Babies have the alternative use for kids to play with.’ 

>He says that digital currencies have three primary weaknesses: They’ve got no intrinsic value, can’t be used to settle all debts — public and private, and are less secure than insured bank deposits. 

It's true kids can pay with Beanie Babies and not Bitcoins, strike one for Bitcoin? 

The only problem with this thought is that Bitcoin doesn't compete with collectables like Beanie Babies, it competes with central banking fiat currency. So how many parents let their kids play with their dollar bills and credit cards? Probably close to zero because that's not what they were designed for.

As for intrinsic value, even fiat currency doesn't hold any intrinsic value and we still use it as money so that argument is a weak one. For settling debts it's used all the time to settle debts in the private sector and unfortunately government has a monopoly on currencies that can settle public debt. This is unfortunate because the founding father wrote in the constitution that only gold and silver can be used as money. So is not settling public debt a deal breaker for Bitcoin? I don't think so, gold and silver have done just fine as investments over the last 100 years.

And lastly the bank deposits are insured by governments because of runs on banks in the 1930s because the banking system was collapsing. So if you've been following the banking system and how they operate today with leveraged assets and fractional reserve banking you'd be worried about future bank run especially since the government bailed them out in 2008 and didn't fix any of the issues that caused the banking collapse in the first place so it's guaranteed to happen again.

I was expecting a better argument for the case against bitcoin and if you remove the government's involvement in money like the founding fathers wanted in the first place, you's have the old system of fiat which is slow and expensive to operate compared to the bitcoin system which is fast and much cheaper to operate it's no guess what the free market would gravitate too.

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Sources: 

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-beanie-babies-make-for-a-better-investment-than-bitcoin-2017-09-05

http://alephblog.com/2017/09/05/where-money-goes-to-die/