Bitcoin might be a plaything for many—a fun way to experiment with digital cash or perhaps to buy things online that you’d rather people didn’t know about. But others are seriously viewing it as a haven during a financial storm.
Our economies and financial systems are built around fiat money, and they rely on the central bank’s control of the currency (and the government’s ability to issue debt in that currency) to help manage the business cycle, fight unemployment, and deal with financial crises. An economy in which Bitcoin was the dominant currency would be a more volatile and harsher economy, in which the government would have limited tools to fight recessions and where financial panics, once started, would be hard to stop.