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So it’s not a currency of exchange, crypto or no. Maybe it will be, someday. But won’t lawmakers and central bankers, who like to keep control of the money levers for such old-school purposes as regulating economic growth and employment in sovereign countries, have something to say about it if that day ever comes?

Most transactions involving Bitcoin only involve Bitcoin, and, of course, good ol’ cash — in other words, buying and selling Bitcoin. The recent offering of futures by major derivatives exchanges might give that process a sheen of legitimacy, but the underlying marketplace looks fraught with risks and challenges, and they go beyond Bitcoin’s astronomical price and wild intraday fluctuations.

The many exchanges out there — Coindesk uses four of the bigger ones to put together its price index, by the way — have been plagued by site outages because they can’t keep up with volume, and reports of price manipulation (spoofing seems to be the game of choice) keep popping up. The exchanges also seem unusually subject to hacking: Youbit, an exchange in South Korea (which is collectively crazy for cryptocurrency trading), declared bankruptcy on Wednesday after hackers made off with a fifth of its clients’ holdings.

As an alternative, many buyers and sellers — who knows how many? — transact directly over peer-to-peer websites. That cuts out the middleman, but…

A buddy of mine remembered recently that somebody paid him in Bitcoin a few years ago — .0167 BTC, to be precise, which was worth a couple bucks back then. So he thought he’d try to unload it. First he had to look around and find his PIN code, which took a while, and then he went online, found a peer-to-peer site, negotiated with potential buyers and eventually came to an agreement with one. The “deal” was set to go down at a street corner downtown, but then the buyer backed out at the last minute (by text). So it was back to the drawing board for my friend, who eventually made the sale online and got paid, via email transfer. (There’s an irony in there somewhere.) True, he ended up making more than $200 on his 1/60th of a coin — but it took him literally a day to transact it.