No, Bitcoin Really Isn’t The Solution To Greece’s Debt Problems

Paul Mason has an interesting piece arguing that Greece could well introduce an adaptation of Bitcoin as a way of dealing with the current debt problem, financial crisis and austerity. Sadly, it’s not quite the get out of jail free card that Mason seems to think it is and there’s even less possibility of it coming to pass. Greece simply would not be allowed to do this. The ECB would cut off the Greek banks immediately and that would be that, game over.
Yet Mason thinks it might happen:
Bizarre and mind-boggling as the parallel currency idea is, my experience in the eurocrisis makes me think it’s likely to happen at some point. So, as you observe me and my fellow eurocrisis tribespeople eking out our lives in dank hotels and lobbies, do not pity us. All the shouting and the whispering only looks like mental torture. It is, in fact, a grand philosophical debate about the nature of money.
This is all based on a blog post by Yanis Varoufakis from some time ago, which can be found here. And there’s absolutely no doubt at all that Varoufakis has his initial analysis correct.

This post was published at Forbes on Tim Worstall/ 2/23/2015.