I expect negative comments from the less educated but to see you blow this new technology off as clouds in the wind is in a word to me, shocking.
You have spent your life adapting to the unexpected and preparing contingencies for multiple scenarios.
I hope you take another look at this technology as it is a completely new invention. Please read Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper.
One example of the power of this new technology is for the first time in the computer age you cannot duplicate a digital representation of a Bitcoin in the blockchain, No cut and paste. It cannot be reproduced or counterfeited. This has never been possible before and the implications are staggering.
I hope you will drill down a little deeper and find out what this is all about. Since its inception till this minute Bitcoins growth has been exponential on a global scale. This technology is here to stay.
Good luck to you and thanks for your time.
I'm of two minds on this.
While the Internet is available and somewhat free (as in freedom), the ability to use Bitcoin as a medium of free exchange for goods and services is amazing, and frees us to a degree from the tyranny of government-sponsored currencies. Unlike credit cards, the "merchant fees" (such as they are) of Bitcoin are incredibly low. The barrier to entry is almost nonexistent. And with so many vendors accepting Bitcoin, it is not true that Bitcoin has to be changed back into dollars or another government-controlled currency to be spent is simply not true. Nor is it true that you have to purchase Bitcoin with dollars; you can buy them with silver or gold.
The bad assumption about Bitcoin is the assumption that the world we live in will remain as it is today. That is normalcy bias. The people of Europe in 1927 assumed the world would be as it was ten years on. We know they were wrong.
Likewise, we could be dead wrong assuming the digital world will remain as stable as it is. (I believe that is part and parcel of Matt Bracken's short fiction, "Alas, Brave New Babylon".) It is possible, even probable, that the Internet as we know it will be sundered into multiple unconnected zones, through the actions of tyrannical governments, chief among them our own federal government. Will the block chain survive this sundering? It's possible (via backups stateside), though nobody knows.
I think people should try Bitcoin, to try and understand what crypto-currencies are all about.
In the final analysis, crypto-currencies are here to stay. Heck, I'd trust a cryptocurrency platform like the block chain (BitCoin's "backbone") to act as a ledger for recording votes. The computing power required to spoof or falsify such a ledger in the short time between voting and certification of the vote simply does not exist at this time.