There’s more to cryptocurrencies than the chance to make quick cash.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Perhaps you thought that the run-up in value on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was just a tulip bulb fever, the soon-to-crash mania of retail investors hungry for some good old-fashioned boom-and-bust after years of a slow-and-steady only their grandparents could love.

And the run-up might well be that fleeting and faddish, but other, less-discussed aspects suggest that the cryptocurrencies are here to stay.

Ask what problem cryptos solve, and you start to understand why it is now possible to buy Bitcoin futures, hedge funds are buying them, and Davos 2018 has made cryptos a primary topic.

Perhaps the simplest explanation for their appeal to the big money can be found in a recent interview with the CIO of a crypto hedge fund called BlockTower Capital, a man named Ari Paul.

The biggest and clearest use case, he told Business Insider’s Sara Silverstein (BI Partners), “is as a store of value that can’t be censored and is resistant to seizure.”

You may not have been worried about having your assets seized, but some people clearly are, based on the size of the offshore banking system. By Mr. Paul’s estimate it is “roughly 20 trillion dollars today.” Newsweek put it at $21 million back in 2016, and said that was conservative.

Who are the people that need the offshore banking system? As if to reassure us, Mr. Paul goes on to say that it is “not just people trying to dodge taxes.” It is also household names like Apple, Amazon, and “every billionaire on the planet.” Basically, any person or corporation who “want[s] to store their wealth securely, in a way that no single judge could freeze.” Google the Paradise Papers to see support for this claim.

What Mr. Paul is really telling us is that what Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and the other emerging cryptocurrencies represent, is an innovation in tax haven-type assets.

Call it Bexit: The billionaires’ exit from the nations and republics that the rest of us continue to inhabit. They can move their money into some extra-national cloud and to some extent, have to answer to no one but themselves.

Many are asking if Bitcoin and the Cryptos will revolutionize the world of money. Perhaps a more realistic approach at this point is to ask not “if,” but “how.” And in this time of rapidly increasing national deficits, to also ask: How can we keep the move to cryptocurrencies from tearing us apart?