February 27, 2011

Alternative Currency: BitCoin



For more info: BitCoin.org

And if you think this is totally insane, check out this episode of This American Life:

This American Life: The Invention of Money

I'm still suspicious of it, only because I haven't had a chance to think it all the way through yet. I'll tell you what I do like about it:

*It's decentralized, meaning that bankers cannot control it. Because there are no bankers.

*The money supply supposedly cannot be fiddled with. It will increase steadily over time, until it reaches a cap. Which means that it is not subject to inflation or deflation.

* It's not backed by anything other than trust, much like our own fiat money supply, except credit doesn't need to be artificially borrowed from Goldman Sachs, er *cough* I mean, the New York Federal Reserve Bank... which means that the value will not fluctuate based on the availability of some arbitrary mineral resource like gold or silver.

4 comments:

  1. I've known about Bitcoin for quite some time, it has an very interesting premise, and the fact that it's a "crypto" currency lends itself away from the ability of a central bank from confiscating the currency and squashing it's implementation (Like the depression era Wörgl was in Austria).

    I'm skeptical of it though, largely because pretty much all the designers of the currency, and participants, are extreme Randian Austrian school of economics types that see this as more of a way to get around taxes than a legitimate way to create a more equitable and better way of exchanging value.

    We'll see though.

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  2. LOL..how's that bitcoin working out for you today!

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  3. Looks like the senate has begun to take attention to it, because of the "silk road", a market where you can use bitcoins to buy narcotics. We'll see what happens next.

    I was always skeptical since day one of it since it seems some attempt to implement "Austrian" economics in it's purest sense.

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