Goldman Sachs has more than one Bitcoin in his wallet

At Goldman Sachs, senior executives have an opinion on Bitcoin... But they do not yet express it clearly. CEO Lloyd Blankfein summed up the bank's position with a tweet on 3 October:"Still thinking about Bitcoin. No conclusion - not endorsing/rejecting. Know that folks also were skeptical when paper money displaced gold" (I still think of bitcoin... No conclusion yet, neither for nor against. People were also skeptical when paper money replaced gold.

Since then, the lines have moved within "The Firm". Goldman Sachs is currently deploying a trading desk in New York, dedicated to cryptocurrencies... The objective would be to have an operational entity in place by next June, perhaps before the planets are aligned faster than expected.

It is reasonable to assume that the rumour stage has passed and that the merchant bank is actually fine-tuning a specialised branch. Especially when we read the answer given by a spokesman asked about the question: to answer our customers' interest in cryptocurrencies, we study the best way to satisfy them.

The "desk" could be housed in the division dealing with bonds, currencies and commodities, but nothing has yet been decided. Juggling with cryptocurrencies cannot be improvised... Goldman Sachs will have to legally frame his activity, secure it, find a storage mode and decide the degree of freedom left to his clients.

Complex issues to be resolved... Bloomberg has reported an anecdote about a certain form of conservatism that persists within the institution, accustomed to ultra-complex financial arrangements, but confused by these cryptocurrencies that it finds difficult to apprehend: When the CBOE launched its first contracts on bitcoin at the beginning of the month, Lloyd Blankfein would have required some of Goldman Sachs' customers to have cash equivalents in good old dollars in front of their trades. A policy which would have led some of them to go through other intermediaries... and which may have provoked a battle to set up a division specialising in the trading of cryptocurrencies.

In finance, all companies have started to work hard on this issue, but if some companies are still defending themselves against it... In the meantime, cryptocurrencies are eating away at the ground in the financial sphere. They are not yet at the stage of institutionalization, but they occupy an increasingly larger space.

For example, Bloomberg terminals now have a "crypto monitor"on their Bloomberg terminals. It contains the in-house definition of a cryptocurrency, a mathematically defined, decentralized digital asset, which allows transactions to be carried out in crypto form without the need for central banks, as well as a list of the most important cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, ripple, ethereum, litcoin) with their prices, quotes on various specialized platforms, plus the two "futures" available on the bitcoin, on the Internet and on the Internet.

Bitcoin prices are not yet on the scrolling bands of the news channels alongside those of gold, oil and the euro-dollar parity. But we may not be so far away...