 The economists have been interested really for hundreds of years in trying to identify what is and what is not money, what are the characteristics of money. I think everybody knows that during the Stone Age people used rocks with holes in the middle of them as money and then gold has in silver served the role of money, now paper currency is typically what people use. But through history money has been an ever changing concept and you now have money that may exist only in computer memory, virtual money. Money usually is said to have three attributes. It's a unit of account that allows you to compare the relative prices of different goods. It's a medium of exchange where people will accept it in exchange for other valuable things and finally it's supposed to be a store of value which means that money tomorrow is worth the same as it was today. It's really very stable relative to the values of other assets and that if you trade something for money or collect a paycheck in money you're confident that the value you're getting will endure pretty much indefinitely. And if those are the three benchmarks, Bitcoin doesn't seem to perform very well in any of those categories. There's a lot of basic financial data that suggests that in terms of being a store of value for instance, Bitcoin is extremely volatile in the day to day price. In fact Bitcoin is probably more volatile than any other financial asset that you could find and it tends to rise or fall almost 10% in a given day which is vastly more than you see for other currencies that trade on markets around the world or even for things like gold or shares of stock. So it's risky and money usually is not risky. It's just not a characteristic that most people would associate with currency. In terms of being a medium of exchange, there's really not too many businesses that accept Bitcoin. The numbers are said to be growing but it's still extremely small. There's many parts of the world where Bitcoin has no presence at all and even in cities where it's popular, Berlin, New York and so forth, the number of businesses still is really infinitesimal. You have to look hard and do a lot of planning. So to call it a medium of exchange I think exaggerates, really it's an instrument of barter where occasionally you might find someone willing to accept it but it requires a lot of legwork, travel, research and so forth. And then as a unit of a camp, Bitcoin has I think further problems because one Bitcoin is worth about $500 which means that a cup of coffee may cost you .01 Bitcoin and other things with other leading decimals which make it just very hard to do price comparisons. People aren't good at working with decimals. From the point of view of these software developers they need to make it easier to use. The digital wallet technology has to evolve to a place where even regular people not comfortable with computers would be able to install this maybe on their mobile phone and use it easily and they have to find a way to add more security to it. The hacking problem has been pretty serious and people can steal Bitcoins really pretty easily and I think that's going to make folks very uncomfortable. So I think from the software development side you really need some improvements in the security coding and the way in which Bitcoins are transferred and maybe these things can be worked out over time. But I think from the other direction you need the behavior of Bitcoin in the markets to stabilize that as long as it gyrates in value as much as it does you're never going to have it really playing the role that money usually does. Money just is not supposed to be as risky as Bitcoin is and so they need to find a way to stabilize the market and I think getting more people involved it's almost a horse before the cart kind of thing. It's not going to be taken seriously as money until many, many more people are using it and many more businesses are accepting it. The real value of Bitcoin is it's a marketing device that attracts a clientele to your business that you would probably wish to have shopping at your store. It is really favored by people who are young and intelligent, wealthy and so forth. People who are more than willing to live their life through their cell phone and this demographic is usually pretty desirable to any retailer. If you're a restaurant you hang out a sign that says we take Bitcoin the kinds of customers who may show up would be really the kind of people you want and to bring their friends and so forth. So as a marketing device it's a way of getting publicity and attracting a certain segment of the market to your business and I think it's understandable why you've seen firms like Dell Computer recently adopted because I think this can only help their business with the tech crowd but I think at the same time they're probably hoping not too many people actually use it. They want to talk about it and get the benefit of the buzz but it creates a number of problems for a business. If people actually want to spend the Bitcoin the business then is daring to risk and has to work with digital wallet companies and so forth. I have a student team working on a year-long Bitcoin project right now and they're doing a big survey of retailers and they find that maybe 60% of them immediately will flip it into another currency but there's a critical mass who hold the Bitcoins in basically in the form of cash on the balance sheet and they're holding it like they would hold any other reserve of dollars or Australian dollars, euros, whatever and they're bearing the risk. Some of them will come out and say that they think the Bitcoin is going to rise in value but just for investment purposes they think this is smart but others have really committed to doing business in Bitcoin on an ongoing basis so if you're going to do that arguably you need to just keep some around to meet liquidity needs, to buy inventory and make change, all the roles that cash plays in the running of a business. I was surprised that they found any businesses at all that hang on to their Bitcoins but they are out there. Maybe a third of the retail footprint is comprised of people who are doing this and they're exposing themselves to risk but in the end who knows they may profit