Will Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Support Cryptocurrency In Greece?

giulioprisco writes New Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, former Economist-in-Residence at game developer Valve Corporation, sees something like Bitcoin — or, more likely, a state-controlled "Fedcoin" — possibly playing a role in the (necessarily creative) rescue of the Greek economy. "The technology of Bitcoin, if suitably adapted, can be employed profitably in the Eurozone," he said.

Comments

Re: Umm... Lulz....

[lgw]

Once the possibility of someone exiting the Euro becomes real other countries will be tempted or pushed out basically making it pointless.

It was an economic marriage. And like in any marriage there are good times and bad times. Unfortunately some in Europe don't think of it this way.

Not pointless - there's real economic benefit to a single currency for Europe.

If it's a marriage, then Greece is the abusive, cheating spouse. They've gone from irresponsibly spending more than they could ever repay (since they can't inflate their way out of debt), through a brief attempt at surviving austerity (terms of the debt relief they got - everyone knew it would suck), to saying "screw you, we're too big to fail, we're gonna spend spend spend, what are you gonna do about it?"

Greece was in a better economic position than most of Eastern Europe at the start of all this, with a better standard of living (even had they chosen to live within their means) than many later entrants in to Euro. But they chose to spend vastly more than they were making, running up the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in Europe, inflating that standard of living artificially until they could borrow no more.

What the US thinks of that isn't very relevant, but those Easter European countries that made real sacrifice to join the Euro, and who have been keeping their debt down and surviving with a much lower standard of living than Greece and directly paying for Greece's first bailout in some cases aren't impressed with Greece's excuses. At this point, a "Grexit" will be less disruptive than continued bailouts.