Are We About to See Bitcoin's Catholic Church/Martin Luther Moment?

Renaissance Macro Research analyst Howard Mason exclaimed this today about the world's hottest currency: "Bitcoin: Put a Fork in it."

In his report, Mason explains there is a major question about the core mission of the currency - will it be a store-of-value (“digital gold”) or medium-of-exchange (“digital payment token”). He believes this will ultimately fracture the bitcoin community leading to permanent hard “forks” in the “block-chain” ledger and hence competing currencies (think the split of the Catholic Church under reformation led by Martin Luther).

Mason argues these “altcoins” will, until advancing along their own evolutionary arcs, substitute for bitcoin and hence undermine its key speculative attraction – a finite supply of 21 million coins.

Furthermore, he said mass adoption of bitcoin will be limited by the need for AML/KYC regulation of bitcoin exchanges, and the case for regulatory investment is undermined by the existence of an alternative, and meaningfully better, cryptographic payments solution which leverages the existing institutional and regulatory infrastructure of banks: the Ripple network.

Mason highlights that unlike Bitcoin, which was motivated by the creation of a new currency with no central bank, Ripple uses shared-ledger technology to exchange value over the internet as quickly and conveniently as the exchange of data. Importantly, users can transact with fiat currency and so do not have to adopt the protocol’s native currency, Ripple XRP, which is more for transactional convenience than end-use.

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