The financial establishment doesn’t know quite what to make of bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency (pdf) whose value has soared by 600 percent this year alone.
Bitcoin is an encrypted global electronics payment system in which prices are stored in an electronic, publicly available ledger called blockchain. Blockchain and associated cryptotechnologies hold out the promise of — and in some ways already are — revolutionizing the ecosystem of trading and settlement, as John Plansky, Tim O’Donnell, and Kimberly Richards laid out comprehensively in strategy+business in early 2016.
