The Implications of Bitcoin: Money Without Government

"You left out comet strikes, massive solar flares, meteor impacts, super volcanos, ice ages, nuclear war, earth shift, plagues, alien attack, supernovas, and the second coming to name a few more instances in which Bitcoin will be useless. "

If such were to happen, then losing my bitcoins would be the least of my concerns.

So what happens when the government takes down the Internet? (And don’t think they don’t have the capability).

People flip their #@$% and they turn it back on.

Seriously, it would be like trying to turn off the lights, people would not stand for it, and the politicians would be running for cover.

Bitcoins can disappear into the ethernet in one keystroke.

Anyone who loses a bitcoin through their own error in effect makes a gift of it to everyone else who holds bitcoins - the reduction in supply has a coincident increase in the relative value of all remaining bitcoins - same as if you dropped a gold coin over the railing during a trans-Atlantic cruise. Since bitcoins are have a theoretical infinite divisibility (currently software locked at 8 decimal points), the absolute number in existence at any point in time is actually irrelevant for valuation purposes.

Gold and silver have been money for 5,000 years.

Indeed, and bitcoin shares all but one of their properties, and has some properties of its own that actually give it more utility as a medium of exchange in the modern world that were scarcely conceivable 500 years ago. I can transmit, at no cost, $100, or $1,000,000 worth of bitcoin to you across the globe with confirmation in minutes. Now ask yourself, why does the Bundesbank have to wait until 2020 to get their gold back from Paris and New York?

If I want to get money out of Argentina or Venezuela, I can do so unnoticed with bitcoin. Now try it with gold or silver in your pockets...

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