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I have been following bitcoin since they were less than a penny each, and got my first coins at about .20 each. I have written articles (really the only thing

• mrb 14y ago
  I made the HN submission; and you know what? I agree with you. On a second thought I would have rather not posted it. I much prefer a slow and steady increase of value, instead of another Bitcoin valuation bubble made even more rapid by publicizing it all the time.
• betterunix 14y ago
  "I believe central bank issued currency that flows through the hands of banks is a mechanism for control over people." Only to the extent that laws are a mechanism for controlling people. I have argued elsewhere that laws are what give money its value, and that Bitcoin still requires the existence of fiat currencies to be useful to anyone (put simply, most people still have taxes to pay and debts to settle, and so they only accept Bitcoin because they believe they can exchange it for another currency; even you speak of Bitcoin in terms of another currency). I would argue, though, that laws and fiat money are not necessarily ways to control people, but that they are necessary tools for any large society. Sometimes people disagree and require a third party to settle their dispute. Laws help give third parties (also known as judges) legitimacy in their judgments -- they can point to laws that were written before the dispute, so that there are fewer questions about bias or personal sentiments affecting the verdict. When people fail to use laws and court systems to settle their disputes, they turn to their weapons and civil wars ensue. At the very least, the operation of a court must be paid for. A person whose job is to mediate disputes all day -- and even a society with only a few thousand people will require such a person -- is not producing food or maintaining infrastructure. We would not be satisfied with a system where the parties in some dispute were directly paying the judge. At the very least, some sort of tax system is needed to pay for a court system, and humans discovered that using animals or crops as taxes does not really satisfy the needs of society. Currency makes taxation fair (do judges need wheat, or do they need cattle?) and reduces the expense of collecting taxes (tax collectors no longer need to decide if one cow is of the same quality as another). Of course, the moment you introduce a tax law that requires people to make payments with money, you have created a fiat currency: you have created a law that fuels demand for money (and thus gives money value), and it makes no difference whether that money is made of clay, gold, paper, or even if that money is nothing more than information stored on computers. So while I can understand the dissatisfaction with what today's banks and governments do with money, I do not think fiat money itself is the problem. Fiat money is a consequence of any appreciably large human society; without it, we would be living in tiny groups in the wilderness, jabbing each other with spears whenever we had a disagreement, or we would be trying to convince government officials that our sheep are of high enough quality to be accepted as a tax payment.