Whoooo-hoooooo, modern day "mining".
Strictly speaking, a currency didn’t fail. A single exchange/bank did.
I’m trading Bitcoins for carbon credits. Half off. Today only. No checks.
Rainbow unicorn fantasy money. Just another liberal fad fueled and hyped up.
When you use Bitcoin for money laundering and black market however, it is just another cost of doing business.
Townhall is on the Bitcoin warpath today.
Is Bitcoin Legal? Illegal? a Currency? a Commodity?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3131268/posts
"By decree of Caesar Augustus in 15 B.C.E., the denarius was nearly pure silver, 95%-98%, and had a fixed weight and value in relationship to the rest of the Roman monetary system. Over the next 270 years, the silver content of the denarius declined gradually and then precipitously to about 2%."
Caesar's image is your tip off that debasement follows.
The boneheaded author probably has no idea how to secure a computer and does not seem to realize that it is in control unlike his credit card details swiped into a merchant computer. Unlike the too-big-to-fail banks, the very largest bitcoin exchange failed and nobody needed to be bailed out. Sure some people lost (or will likely lose) what that had at Mt Gox but that loss was due to greed, pure and simple. Keeping coins at an exchange means you are either flipping them in and out of meat world currency and speculating, or you are cashing your bitcoin proceeds for meat world currency instead of spending or donating them inside the digital world. It's true that people need meat (food) to survive and might go through an exchange for that, but not 100's of thousands of dollars worth.
However, personal and business transactions can be spied by hackers or government security agencies through its fairly open payments system. The government can subpoena your Bitcoin records or those of your exchange when it needs.
Now I know the author is just a bonehead. The transaction chain is public because it has to be for the system to work. Nobody legitimately looking into bitcoin is doing so to evade government spying, but are rather trying to use the currency for what it is good for: digital transactions for digital goods. The drug dealers and others with physical goods are just as stupid as the author.
Detractors of paper money have always been fixated by the absence of gold to back it up, but they fail to recognize what really makes a currency accepted and secure—the government guarantee and the good sense of the sovereign not to abuse its franchise.
The author seems to not realize that the government is printing 10's of billions a month to give to politicians to spend. He is either extremely stupid or agrees with that practice and maybe gets a cut himself.
Is that paper in your wallet not a “virtual currency”? It’s value is based on the fact that someone says it is. Really it’s nothing but a representation of debt paid for by future production. People recognize it for having “value” I guess, so whatever. From what I understand, history isn’t very kind to societies/civilizations/empires that go down the road that we’re on....
It is an UN regulated peer to peer currency.
What is it that people don’t understand about UN regulated? It’s the Wild West.
remember this argument the next time a bank is robbed or closes as its a sign the dollar has collapsed and the entire financial system is broken
There are 3 major benefits of Bitcoin that I can see: it’s private, you can easily transfer money, and it has a limit. However, the concept of Bitcoin mining seems to be an absurdity that confers absolutely no value. Ascribing value to the ability to solve complex equation seems to parallel the socialist notion that the value of labor should comport with the complexity of labor. Rubbish.
“It’s not the gold but the face of Caesar—the promise his image carries—that makes a coin money.”
This statement is true in the sense that fiat money does have value even when not backed by PMs. Fiat money is backed by taxation/and or the forceable extraction of resources from the people. In other words, fiat currency is backed by a gun.
Now if Bitcoin or some other crypto-currency could compete with the world wide gangster government fiat currency at the same level, we would have a winner. Perhaps, if Bitcoin successfully found a way to fight back against governments, central banks and agencies intent on the destruction of Bitcoin, we would see an unprecedented advance in personal freedom. Instead of the Bitcoin mining of useless equations, why not develop the means to hack and attack hostile forces?
For those who are wise money is simply a “hot potato” token of value to be used to facilitate the exchange of physical assets. The higher the inflation, the hotter the potato.
Bump
How many banks have failed? Did the USD go away?
No?
How about that...