Yanis Varoufakis: “Greece Will Adopt the Bitcoin If Eurogroup Doesn’t Give Us a Deal”

[Chathamization]

61. Bringing back the drachma would make sense, not switching to bitcoin (this is an April Fools' joke)

As others have mentioned, one of the big problems with the Euro is that Greece can't control it's own currency. So it ends up being stuck with the currency policy that the Germans want, even if it would do much better with much higher inflation. Borrowing in your own currency also means that deficits become much less of a problem (according to Krugman, who I think has a good record with these things).

Switching to the bitcoin would mean that they still wouldn't be able to control their own monetary supply or borrow in their own currency; it'd also add the extra problem of being extremely volatile (look at the exchange rate over the past couple of years), and most likely deflationary since it'd be comparable to the gold standard.

I should note that the article mentions that it's an April fools joke at the bottom of the page, and then links to a blog post by the finance minister about some of the issues with using the bitcoin as a currency (written before he became the finance minister):

No, there are two insurmountable flaws that make bitcoin a highly problematic currency: First, the bitcoin social economy is bound to be typified by chronic deflation. Secondly, we have already seen the rise of a bitcoin aristocracy (a term ‘coined’ by Greek blogger @techiechan) which, besides the issues of distributive justice which it raises, evokes serious fears about the capacity of very few entities or persons to manipulate the currency in a manner that enriches them at the expense of financial instability.