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The Future of Cryptocurrencies
kierny writes "Today, Bitcoin, tomorrow, the dollar? Former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt says governments will learn from today's crypto currencies and use them to fashion future government-protected monetary systems. But along the way, expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall, in a repeat of the fate of AltaVista, Napster, and other early innovators. But the prospect of fashioning a better, more stable crypto currency system — and the likelihood that Bitcoin may one day burn — is good news for anyone who cares about crypto currencies, as well as the future and reliability of our monetary systems."
Tell me again how crypto-currencies being "future government-protected monetary systems" is good news?
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
Anything that makes it easy to transfer funds to anyone in the world without going through PayPal is a good thing.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Except iTunes 1.0 didn't come out until the same year Napster was shut down.
I didn't support iPod's until after Napster was gone too. (probably because iPod's didn't exist then)
so:
Napster -> iTunes, Bitcoins -> something that doesn't exist yet, not Dogecoin. Dogs don't need currency.
I've made similar comments to those who've waved negative news articles about bitcoin in my face. The interesting thing about all this is; it was never about "Bitcoin", it was about the concept of cryptocurrency, driven by the revolutionary ability to create digital scarcity. You'd better believe though, that if governments get involved, the whole idea of a publically viewable global transaction ledger (i.e. blockchain.info) will never see the light of day.
Darkcoin?
Governments and the elites have long had access to and will always have access to professional killers, the only difference is the volume of transactions that will be conducted and their targets.
iCoins are the new thing. Apple is releasing them next week. You need an iPhone to use them. All iTunes transactions will require iCoins. You also can only buy them in $1000 USD increments.
Tell me again how crypto-currencies being "future government-protected monetary systems" is good news?
Actually, I want to know why bitcoin wouldn't be government protected. Trading bitcoins for some good or service would just be a type of barter exchange. So unless what is being purchased is illegal, then the law, police and courts would still apply to handle situations like fraud and theft.
What we've learned so far from Bitcoin:
It may be popular to slam bitcoins right now but the fact is after all these scandals they're still incredibly valuable with a lot of forward momentum. This is a very new technology and its going to go through growing pains. Its interesting that 'anonymous' money is such a two edged sword. One the one hand people want it because they're worried about the government stealing their money yet the very fact its anonymous makes it a ripe target for theft. You need to protect your bitcoins! Hopefully people are realizing that doesn't mean storing them in a perl hack website in another country.
AltaVista was merely one search engine in a pool of many.. Yahoo, Hotbot, and Lycos were all around at the time and they did not all fail.
Napster only failed because the government/court system took them down. If it weren't for Napster being forced to close up its business, there were no indications that people were leaving it. Napster was a disruption in the industry and major players moved in unison to take it down.
A direct contrast to this comparison is TCP/IP. Since the creating of TCP/IP, there have been numerous (arguably better) protocols. However, the whole Internet runs on TCP/IP and it does not look to be going away any time soon. Like most new technologies, I would guess that the first virtual currency to be widely adopted would be the virtual currency that becomes the standard. Any new currency has a huge uphill battle in trying to become more mainstream than Bitcoin at this point.
Bitcoin is designed so that governments or other entities cannot take it down. The fact that governments, corporations, or single powerful individuals cannot control it is a feature - not a flaw. Gus Hunt, along with every other powerful well-established individual, would naturally be against the adoption of Bitcoin. But, saying to expect it to fail looks more like wishful thinking on their part.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
bitcoin isn't the Napster of currency...that's part of the scam!
the **system** of generating "bitcoins" is novel for sure, but as implemented it looks like the whole thing was a scam...part of the scam, of course, is to get people to take it seriously...
that's why drug dealers have 'front' operations!
they were tapping into the 'l33t h@x0r' crowd
BTC is an 'alternative currency' in today's financial world, but really it's just an algorythm that allocates resources based on parameters
what makes BTC a currency is the act of trading it...it's comparable to trading a nug of weed for a beer
anything traded is 'currency'...BTC is an algorythm for allocating resources in a closed exchange community
Napster mediated file transfers anonymously...BTC is not the mediation, it is the thing being traded...MtGOX is the mediator
so MtGox::Napster
Thank you Dave Raggett
A black market is a pretty essential thing if you are opposed to tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority.
Every time I see/hear someone mention "[X] has no value!" I feel like I have to remind them of the subjectivity of value. Robert Heinlein, I feel, provided the best interpretation:
"Value" has no meaning other than in relationship to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—"market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible. [...] This very personal relationship, "value", has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him."i/>
-Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (Ret.), pp. 93-94 [Starship Troopers]
I didn't believe dogecoin was real at first. I thought it was a weird front of some anti-bitcoin group that took to a very annoying way of mocking its opponent. I didn't find out it was real until I was reading some user stories of scammers, and hackers in the "Dogecoin network" and people griping about how they had made their way over from something called Litecoin. Things are already moving too fast for me, in my twenties...
On a more serious note, ripple looks interesting.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
iTunes was hardly a first mover
So, while AltaVista, Napster and Friendster may be in the first mover categories of their respective industries, iTunes falls into the same space as Google and Facebook... who all built upon and capitalised on the missteps of the early pioneers in their respective industries.
You don't need new law for the same old thing "on a computer". It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise. How illegal depends on the value, and jurisdiction may be particularly muddy here.
There's no need for the law to "mention bitcoins", that's a distraction, but law enforcement is only going to go after complicated cross-jurisdictional thefts when the value is high and the evidence is clear. We might not see prosecutions because bitcoin isn't taken seriously, or because the hackers simply got away with it.
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Except iTunes 1.0 didn't come out until the same year Napster was shut down.
I would say Napster -> Bittorrent
eGold -> Bitcoin
Napster was a centralized protocol, so it was vulnerable to a lawsuit against the company that ran it. Bittorrent with the distributed hash table was a distributed protocol that succeeded Napster. So far, nobody's managed to shutdown Bittorrent.
You failed to engage the implicit argument of noblebeast that states cannot be trusted to manage a currency that they can create by fiat
The biggest problem with Fiat currencies is not so much that they are originally created by Fiat. It's that the banks with the help of the government can change the rules later and print more bills, through fractional reserve, whenever they would like to do so.
With cryptocurrencies The rules are mathematically decided --- the creators of the protocol cannot arbitrarily change the rules later and start printing more coins at a quantity/rate not agreed to when the protocol was created. The rules can only change with agreement of the users of the currency.