Posted on 01/23/2014 6:15:21 PM PST by Errant
One of my favorite things about bitcoin is how its such an all-inclusive tent.
Bitcoin attracts political idealists from the right, political idealists from the left, Silicon Valley technologists, social science academics, philosophers, capitalists, socialists, and even apolitical speculators.
Alex Payne kicked off this latest round of analysis with his blog piece: Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology. A self-described programmer and secular humanist, Payne worked as an early engineer at Twitter building the services developer platform and backend infrastructure.
(Excerpt) Read more at coindesk.com ...
If such were to happen, then losing my bitcoins would be the least of my concerns.
The least of mine too. lol
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.
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...
Thanks for the title, The Diamond Age, as I intend to read it - sounds exciting!
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