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US Law Can't Keep Up With Technology -- and Why That's a Good Thing (newsweek.com)
HughPickens.com writes: In the 1910s, the number of cars in the US exploded from 200,000 to 2.5 million. The newfangled machines scared horses and ran over pedestrians, but by the time government could pass the very first traffic law, it was too late to stop them. Now Kevin Matley writes in Newsweek that thanks to political gridlock in the US, lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. New technologies spread almost instantly and take hold with almost no legal oversight. According to Matley, this is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. "Drone aircraft are suddenly filling the sky, and a whole multibillion-dollar industry of drone making and drone services has taken hold," says Matley. "If the FAA had been either farsighted or fast moving, at the first sign of drones it might've outlawed them or confined them to someplace like Oklahoma where they can't get in the way of anything too important. But now the FAA is forced to accommodate drones, not the other way around." Bitcoin is another example of a technology that's too late to stop. "But have you heard the word bitcoin uttered once in any of the presidential debates? Government doesn't even understand bitcoin, and that's been really good for it." Uber and Airbnb show how to execute this outrun-the-government strategy. By the time cities understood what those companies were doing, it was too late to block or seriously limit them.
> Uber and Airbnb show how to execute this outrun-the-government strategy.
If you can outrun the government, it is no government, just a joke. A real GOVERNMENT would stop Uber overnight, by rounding up the drivers and shooting every 3rd in public. Whoever protests is also shot. The remaining would back down for fear of life.
That kind of government went out of fashion after 1990 in many parts of the world, but could return very quickly since the populace gets fed up with the anarchy. People want order and stability in life, not "liberty" (anarchism secretly run by masons). The USA is an abnormal exception, not the rule.
> Bitcoin is another example of a technology that's too late to stop.
If you think the NSA doesn't have a virgin leather-bound, gold-leafed folio with hexadecimal printout of every single possible bitcoin inside, I have an ethernet bridge to sell you... On the other hand, we can only theorize why they don't just dump all possible bitcoins on the net, thereby instantly annulling its value.
Please also consider that even the government can't create non-radiocative silver, gold or platinum, even they have to rely on mining what Mother Nature has created eons ago. That's what gives inherent value to the precious, something crypto-nerds lack.