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MIT May Help Lead Bitcoin Standards Effort
gthuang88 writes: With everyone from PayPal merchants to Rand Paul starting to accept Bitcoins as payment, the race is on to develop technical standards for the virtual currency. Now MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito is getting ready to unveil a plan for MIT to become an independent, neutral home for standards development. Ito is enlisting cryptographer Ron Rivest and economist Simon Johnson to help with the effort, which could provide an academic alternative to the Bitcoin Foundation for conversations about the currency's future. Ito says, "I’m not pushing it, but I’m offering MIT as a neutral academic home for some of the conversations and the technical coordination. Which I think will give a lot more stability to Bitcoin, which right now is a little bit fragile."
There is a difference though, in the form of ubiquity. There have been attempts to use scrip through the years; there are cases where towns and cities will issue scrip when one uses parking meters that can be redeemed in lieu of dollars at participating vendors, and times where the US government has used scrip in warzones to reduce the proliferation of funding for nefarious purposes, and even sometimes businesses in a common area will attempt to use scrip to encourage return visits because that scrip is only redeemable in that area, but in the end, it's not widely enough accepted to last. Even when Wildcat Banks whose intent was to be universally accepted issued their own notes before the establishment of a central banking authority in the United States there were lots of problems; banks could go under and their notes would become worthless in the holders' hands.
We've watched Bitcoin jump all over the damn place. We've seen numerous scandals involving theft of what's considered to be a lot of money, using the very structure of the system as the means to orchestrate the theft. Bitcoin is not mature enough to be used as a true replacement currency.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.