"Bubble" has been used with so many contextual implications that it's practically meaningless. In this case it's effectively used to describe the digital divid

"Bubble" has been used with so many contextual implications that it's practically meaningless. In this case it's effectively used to describe the digital divide in a new network protocol, just as the dot-com bubble before it. The casino analogy is accurate only if you ignore what most commentators fail to comprehend: Cryptocurrencies are both a technological innovation and a COMPETING CURRENCY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking#History_of_free_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking#History_of_free_b... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_currency The Federal Reserve is very simply a banking cartel, which gives the United States a single stable currency to conduct transactions efficiently and maintain a unified economy. Obviously the trade-off in this system is a permanent banking oligopoly. The casino analogy works better if you include the notion that we all live and work within a dramatically larger casino. To answer the underlying point of the article, most of these cryptocurrencies are as much a scam as CompuServe, Usenet, Netcom, or whatever else is still walled off from the internet stack.