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Central Banks Can't Ignore the Cryptocurrency Boom (bloomberg.com)
The boom in cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology is becoming too big for central banks, long the guardian of official money, to ignore. From a report: Until recently, officials at major central banks were happy to watch as pioneers in the field progressed by trial and error, safe in the knowledge that it was dwarfed by roughly $5 trillion circulating daily in conventional currency markets. But now as officials turn an eye toward the increasingly pervasive technology, the risk is that they're reacting too late to both the pitfalls and the opportunities presented by digital coinage. "Central banks cannot afford to treat cyber currencies as toys to play with in a sand box," said Andrew Sheng, chief adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission and Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute, University of Hong Kong. "It is time to realize that they are the real barbarians at the gate." Bitcoin -- the largest and best-known digital currency -- and its peers pose a threat to the established money system by effectively circumventing it. Money as we know it depends on the authority of the state for credibility, with central banks typically managing its price and/or quantity. Cryptocurrencies skirt all that and instead rely on their supposedly unhackable technology to guarantee value.
It wasn't "Forbes" -> http://i.imgur.com/fVkJLcX.png
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Is it unhackable?
No. There is an inherent flaw in the design, the 51% attack.
"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future."
http://www.investopedia.com/te...
Another flaw in bitcoin is that its design assumes that anyone can be a miner. That was an incorrect assumption. CPUs and GPUs can not economically mine bitcoin, specialized ASIC hardware is necessary. So mining is not done by the masses as assumed, it is done by a specialized few.