Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin?
Nerval's Lobster writes "It hasn't been a great week for Bitcoin. Cruise the Web, and you'll find stories from people who lost thousands (even millions, in some cases) of paper value when the Mt.Gox exchange went offline for still-mysterious reasons. (Rumors have circulated for days about the shutdown, ranging from an epic heist of the Bitcoins under its stewardship, to financial improprieties leading the exchange to the edge of bankruptcy.) But as one Slashdotter pointed out in a previous posting, Mt.Gox isn't Bitcoin (and vice versa), and it's likely that other exchanges will take up the burden of helping manage the currency. Even so, all currencies depend on a certain amount of stability and trust in order to survive, and Bitcoin faces something of a confidence crisis in the wake of this event. So here's the question: do you still trust Bitcoin?"
I trust bitcoin itself just fine... it's the third party exchanges I don't trust.
This is like asking when you stopped beating your wife.
It assumes a positive that for most people doesn't exist.
http://xkcd.com/538/
Well, not exactly, but many of us are renting the huts we live in which in 2005, we owned. Plus, the people who managed to hang on to their houses lost a significant portion of their savings in the form of equity when the prices crashed.
Further, six years of near-zero interest rates and $80 billion/month of free money going to banks has eroded our savings. If real inflation (not the adjusted numbers from the government) are near 8%, as many economists estimate, and your savings have netted 0%, you have lost a considerable amount of wealth and the value of your labor.
All this while the economic elite have seen enormous gains in their incomes.
You could continue and look at the social costs of this increasing disparity, which are substantial and include everything from disease rates to depression and family breakdown, but even without taking these externalities into account, the hacking of the banking system (which continues, by the way), has been enormously costly you to and me and the people who matter to you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course there is. The law. Of course, that may not always save your skin, but it doesn't mean there is nothing at all.
Well, almost no markets in nature. Chimps exchange sex for meat