How do economists view Bitcoin?

Question

Have there been any articles or presentations about Bitcoins in any influential or respected economic websites or perhaps interviews with notable economists?

Answer 1

Paul Krugman, who is apparently the "17th most widely cited economist in the world today", wrote this article in Sep 2011: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/golden-cyberfetters/

Personally, I'm not convinced that Krugman fully understands Bitcoin though (after all, it has substantially different properties to other money), and I'm not the only one. Some responses to his comments are here:

• http://presentcynosure.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/krugmans-bitcoin-error/
• http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/09/paul-krugman-incites-bitcoin-cyber-geek-infighting/42188/

Answer 2

Bob Murphy spoke about Bitcoin in his Reddit Ask Me Anything video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyUNdzLwte4&feature=youtube_gdata_player He commented in relation to regression theorem. Many Austrian economists believe that Bitcoin violates Mises' regression theory, as if Von Mises was supposed to predict computationally ensured persistent logical objects...

Answer 3

You can read George Selgin, a free banking advocate. Make sure to download the paper, not just the abstract.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2000118

Answer 4

Planet Money on NPR did a story about bitcoin a while back: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/13/137795648/the-tuesday-podcast-bitcoin

They spoke to a few economists in there.

Answer 5

Russ Roberts interviews Gavin:

• http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.html