Yanis Varoufakis: 'Bitcoin is the perfect bubble, but blockchain is a remarkable solution' | WIRED UK

Yanis Varoufakis: 'Bitcoin is the perfect bubble, but blockchain is a remarkable solution' | WIRED UK: To understand what Varoufakis means by the political nature of money, consider how governments respond to financial crises. When a major financial crisis occurs, it is usually caused by the failure of widespread and interconnected debts. Once these debts fail, what happens is that a large part of the money supply effectively disappears. With this money gone, governments have a choice whether to replace it or not. Choosing not to replace it through the creation of new money (inflation) becomes a political decision with political repercussions. As Varoufakis suggests, “effectively you are choosing to shift the burden of a crisis onto the debtors and usually the weakest and poorest of debtors. So effectively you are redistributing power and wealth against the weaker members of society.”