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The Halsey Minor’s company notable dismissing of bitcoin digital currency in favour of “pure” and neutral blockchain technology gave sceptics a handle for a new round of speculations on impending death of bitcoin.

Bitreserve, a digital assets platform based on blockchain technology, has changed its name to Uphold and stopped supporting bitcoin as its primarily currency. The company founded by Halsey Minor over a year ago now shifts from digital currency exchange to a broad “Internet of Money” platform allowing its customers from EU, US and China to make deposits in fiat currencies via bank transfers or credit and debit cards.

Bitcoin demotion from an exclusive instrument and funding option to a grade of just another currency supported by the platform alongside with 23 fiat currencies and four precious metals reflects the vision of Uphold executive team. Both Halsey Minor, the founder and chairman of Bitreserve/Uphold, and the company’s CEO Anthony Watson are pronounced bitcoin sceptics.

“I’ll be surprised if bitcoin is here in five years. The value of bitcoin isn’t the currency, but the technology. I think once the world becomes more accustomed and attuned to the platform of bitcoin, the noise will go away, and the currency will go away too. The real transformation is the idea of taking all barriers down…,” Watson, a former Nike CIO, told Fortune.

Minor shares these beliefs as well, predicting bitcoin as currency “will be destroyed”. He claims that digital currency has created “a loophole in the wall” allowing people to hold value without having to connect to a bank. But while the technology that underpins it will fight its way into mainstream disrupting the financial world, bitcoin as a currency will stay a marginal phenomenon and soon will pass away.

The Uphold leadership is not the only one to hold such position. As Blythe Masters, a CEO at Digital Asset Holdings and former JPMorgan executive, recently said at the Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit, one should forget bitcoin to embrace blockchain.  “I never became particularly enamoured with cryptocurrency,” she confessed. Instead she is going to sell the idea of blockchain as “nothing more than a fancy kind of database” to major banks and financial institutions.

However, the idea of “good” blockchain vs. “ugly” bitcoin is not universally upheld by experts. Those who speculate on the inevitable demise of the currency itself are missing the point or displaying a “willful ignorance”, insists Martin Tillier, a columnist at Nasdaq.com. Uphold separating themselves from the currency should not be regarded as an omen and the beginning of the end for the digital currency, he believes. Bitcoin as a currency come laden with a philosophy of a decentralised “trustless” society, an appealing idea for a certain part of community – and this is enough for its survival if not the prosperity, he concludes.

“Part of the appeal of Bitcoin to its adherents is that it is a “trustless” system, and as far as I can see Uphold would be an extension of the current status quo, where a third party ultimately controls the wealth of the individual. There are still, and probably always will be, those that dislike that enough to pursue an alternative. When that is combined with the practical difficulties of separation it looks to be sufficient to ensure the survival of Bitcoin, as inconvenient as that may be to some.”

 

Nadya Krasnushkina