What well-respected economists have analyzed Bitcoin?

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I don't think you'll be able to find a "top" economist here on Quora, as economists and investors shy away from sharing their secrets on social networks, as they don't want anyone to gain a competitive advantage. Also the top economists don't need to use user contributed websites to share their views. Jon Matonis writes for Forbes about Bitcoin on his blog, and he was a Chief Forex Trader at VISA, so talk to him or read his blog about it.

I'm part of an investment society and I'm designated to work with VC and Forex. My credentials is web development and that I've come up with a strategy so that I always make profits dealing with Forex, 9 times out of 10. More of our money goes to fees than it does to losses, and there's a 0.6 - 0.8% profit increase of the funds each month.

I believe that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, because its predetermined supply creation rate is designed to reward early adopters and devalue the value of the currency for the people who signed up to use Bitcoin years late. If you know anything about the famous Bitcoin hack where $500,000 worth of Bitcoins were hacked from someone's wallet and allegedly sent to Lulzsec, you'll know that the victim gained those Bitcoins for leaving his computer on to run a "miner". That gold rush is over, and people can't gain half a million dollars for leaving their computer on any more, and the market of people who would buy custom PCs designed for mining, has closed.

If I had known about Bitcoin when it first came out, I would have jumped on it. As I'm a web developer, I would have started some Bitcoin services to go viral from the Bitcoin forum, and resurrect my Get Paid To site and make it accept Bitcoins. I would have caught the wave.

I don't like Bitcoin, as I find it to be a sophisticated way to assist money laundering. Bitcoin is just a better reincarnation of Liberty Reserve. (A website.)

For those who don't know, Liberty Reserve acts like a payment processor like PayPal because you can use it to pay for things online, but instead all payments are anonymous, irreversible, and no identification is needed.

Also once you deposit money into these "digital gold" accounts, you cannot withdraw it. Instead you have to "exchange" it with an "exchanger", so your $200 you hold in Liberty Reserve, will be $190 once Alert Exchanger wires it to your bank in 2 days. As you're allowed to give these "digital gold" companies as little or as much information about you as you want, if anything goes wrong like you getting scammed (LR is used mainly for HYIP scams), you can't be helped.

And no, the US government isn't going to shut down Liberty Reserve, as they're based in Costa Rica. Think of all the money Liberty Reserve gets to keep. Costa Rica's government must now be rich! A competitor to Liberty Reserve called e-gold got shut down in 2009 that was operated in Florida, as it was being used to sell child porn.

Imagine having a teleporter that can transmit objects anywhere in the world much like BitTorrent can for files, where you can send and receive things without anyone knowing you've done it. Bitcoin has just done that for money. The world has got a lot more dangerous thanks to its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, and as that's a false name, nobody knows who he is.

I'm sorry, but Satoshi knew exactly what he was doing when he invented Bitcoin. Yes Bitcoin protects us from government control of our money and a central authority, but "what" exactly, has Satoshi protected us from?

He's the first cryptographer to solve the double spending problem. He could have used his hacking talent to do greater things. PS. Anonymous Bitcoin payments can be traced. The Bitcoin hacker who stole $500k worth of Bitcoins, got traced, despite the ability to make a new disposable Bitcoin address in 5 seconds without authentication.

What you can't do with Bitcoin is use it to pay for food in the supermarket, but you can use it for drugs, tax evasion, and organised crime.

That brings me to the markets. If you have Bitcoins, you can make money selling them or for investing (lol) them. However 73% of the Bitcoins aren't being spent. (I was right. It is profitable to hoard Bitcoins.) Also you can take advantage of the services which are participating in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and many of them are creative, although some of them are scams.

I know nothing about the Bitcoin markets, I only know what you can buy with it and what services exist. Me and the investment group I'm in don't interest ourselves with the Bitcoin market. Everyone in my investment group has their own speciality of what they're good at, and I imagine that using Bloomberg Terminal, CMC Markets or investing in a premium food shop or startup, does not compare in any way to anything to do with making money with Bitcoin. (We cannot do VC yet as we have £100k in our accounts yet.)

There is something inspiring and beautiful about people spending their Bitcoins on investment programs and auction sites knowing they have no protection for fraud, as the services are community run, and they provide more originality and let the people feel they are cared for. Whether the anarchists will be happy with the end result, remains to be seen, and is resounding to be a no.

There's no way that the society I'm in is going to be trading in Bitcoins any time soon, as trading Bitcoins involves having one currency and buying and selling it.

My favourite quote on Bitcoin is this.

hugodrax wrote:
What makes all of this fishy there are vendors willing to take bitcoins and provide silver coins in return. Why would someone let their account balance hit 500K in monopoly money without arbing such an easy money opportunity. There are supposed vendors that trade bitcoins for Canadian 1 ounce .9999 silver dollars.

I find it hilarious how all these bullshit scams are popping up and suddenly the idiot libertarians who bought into this nonsense are finding out the hard way that anonymous untraceable transactions aren't always a good thing.

there's also at least one casino thing that's almost certainly a scam, and I think someone has actually created a site that supposedly lets you short sell bitcoins

it's like they're running through the centuries-long process of discovering why currencies need regulations etc in just a few weeks.

(They're not libertarians, they're anarchists, but I get the point. Many people wrongly think that Bitcoin is libertarian.)

However I probably could make profits if I spent £20 on 2.4663 Bitcoins from Intersago (British regulated business), and then divided them up using an online service, that would go viral. On the one hand you can stick your middle finger up to the government and to your potential customers around you, and on the other hand you can easily start your own business that governs things and give a caring hand to your potential customers with ease. (Bitcoin companies are known to being sued or shut down by law enforcement for not having the technical ability to comply with data retention requests.)

Bitcoin is just something that is very easy to capitalise on because there is no divide and rule, and no politician or business person being bureaucratic because you're taking away their tax money or market share. Take from it what you will because you can reap loads, but don't forget to account for the risks.