Letters: P.T. Barnum and bitcoins

Re “Closure leaves bitcoin on the brink,” Feb. 26

Sorry, but it’s hard to feel the slightest sympathy for anyone who lost money in the recent bitcoin exchange collapse.

Reporting by The Times over the years has demonstrated time and again that today’s financial markets are replete with self-serving internal corruption, incompetent regulation and sometimes downright thievery. Why would any sane person invest in a “currency” that exists only in the cloud, unregulated by anyone?

P.T. Barnum was right.

Richard Rothschild

Los Angeles

Some time ago, securities were invented, which allowed private people to invest in companies in return for ownership. After the crash of 1929, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules, which were enacted into laws, that scrutinized public offerings and transactions in the market.

Suppose the government had outright banned securities as opposed to targeting bad actors. Legal and technological innovations would have been stymied.

For the most part, people’s negative reactions to bitcoin have been caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. Bitcoin actually transcends money and exchanges, as it’s a utility for property rights, based on possession of private keys associated with whatever value.

Its applications are potentially most profound in developing countries that lack decades of post-industrial infrastructure.

If mere possession is nine-tenths of the law, the bitcoin protocol can act as a safeguard when access to courts, governing bodies and functioning bureaucracies is nonexisting.

William Ha

Altadena

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