Business school Dean sticks up for Bitcoin

The dean of Imperial’s Business School published an article in Monday’s edition of City A.M. bemoaning the finance industry’s complacency when it came to Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies.

Using the example of Sony complacent attitude to MP3, which allowed Apple to sweep in and take advantage, Professor G. ‘Anand’ Anandalingam warned that big banks, like Barclays, that have been closing the accounts of customers with dealing in Bitcoin, are at risk of losing out.

Last year, a British teen’s Barclays account was closed with little explanation after he’d dabbled in the Bitcoin trade, and the incident was not isolated.

The Dean went on to describe the merits of Bitcoin, saying that big business should stop seeing it as currency used by those on the dark web and embrace the speed it can bring to electronic transactions.

Having mentioned Imperial’s own “digital money startup”, Yoyo, he also used the article to plug Imperial’s symposium on the subject, brought to you by Citi bank. The event, held at Canary Wharf on Tuesday, also gave the Dean the opportunity to announce the founding of a new Centre for Global Finance and Technology at the Business School. The centre will be headed up by Professor Andrei Kirilenko, who has previously worked for the US government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission and MIT’s School of Management.

Anandalingam unsurprisingly hailed Citi as one of the few banks that had moved with the times and embraced the new financial technology, or ‘fintech’.

Bitcoin was started with the aim of decentralising a currency, so it wasn’t in control of banks or governments, but rather by traceable network of users online. Recently, the system has struggled to deal with technical issues. Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn recently said that “the community [of Bitcoin] had failed”, that it was “completely controlled by a handful of people” and that the network was on the “brink of technical collapse”.