As CoinTelegraph reports, in an interesting turn of events, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, will be the keynote speaker at a Blockchain and banking conference in October hosted by Ripple.

Bernanke is an interesting call for the keynote speaker as he has criticized cryptocurrencies in the past... (via Qz.com)

[Bitcoin]'s interesting from a technological point of view. We're in a world where the payments system is evolving quickly and new approaches to managing payments are proliferating, and some of the ideas around bitcoin will no doubt be useful in doing that.

But I think bitcoin itself has some serious problems. The first is that it hasn't shown to be a stable source of value. Its price has been highly volatile and it hasn't yet established itself as a widely accepted transactions medium.

But the real serious problem that it has is it's anonymity, which is a feature, and is also a bug, in that it has become in some cases a vehicle for illicit transactions, drug selling or terrorist financing or whatever. And you know, governments are not happy to let that activity happen, so I suspect that there will be oversight of transactions done in bitcoin or similar currencies and that will reduce the appeal.