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What a false dichotomy. So people are either buying Bitcoin purely for its use as a currency or purely speculating? You're missing the forest for the trees. Do

What a false dichotomy. So people are either buying Bitcoin purely for its use as a currency or purely speculating? You're missing the forest for the trees. Do you want to see real political and economic change in your lifetime? Campaign finance reform: not the answer. Term limits: not the answer. Voting Libertarian: waste of time. "Balance the budget": too little, too late. Political activism: occupy my asshole. The only solution: flip societal power structures upside down, and let us geeks take the reigns. Now, you may argue that everything is Hunky Dory like tptacky, but I'd beg to differ. We need real social and economic change, right now, to ensure our continued prosperity into the forseeable future, and we're just not getting it from Washington. Make excuses or justify a Big Brother Statist tyranny driven by propaganda and ignorance all you want, ultimately none of that shit works long term and meanwhile we have a lot less freedom. Let's play a different game now ...

InclinedPlane 14y ago
You are so full of yourself and living in a fantasy world it's sad to watch. Bitcoin isn't a revolution, you've been duped. It's just another pyramid scheme being used by those with more power, more money, more information, and fewer morals to take advantage of folks like you who just want to believe. Do you really want to change the system? Write blogs. Write books. Start a business. Do investigative journalism. Speak at rallies. Work on a campaign. Run for mayor. Run for congress. There are a million ways to empower yourself and others, using bitcoin isn't any of them. Imagining that bitcoin is the answer is about as naive as imagining that hitting "like" on your facebook feed is going to magically feed some starving child somewhere.
- dragontamer 14y ago
  To be fair, bitcoin has a number of interesting technical promises. The economics of bitcoin are... probably going to be bad, for many reasons. But some decentralized digital coin in some form seems like a good idea. The concept of a transaction log that tracks your money from start to finish is also interesting. Bitcoin will remain a pyramid scheme due to its deflationary nature. But maybe a future coin can be invented that solves the problems with bitcoin?
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    To be truly decentralized you need something like "digital cash", but nobody's been able to come up with a good way of implementing that, yet. Also, I'm not sure people are prepared to mix the problems of cash and electronic transactions just yet, there are some advantages to the banking system we have now, such as the ability to reverse fraudulent transactions. I think the example from fiction, Cryptonomicon, is actually very helpful, because they understood they needed a big honking pile of gold to kick-start the legitimacy of the whole thing, if it's just free floating then it too easily becomes a pyramid scheme and you have people who just do currency exchanges but who never actually use the new currency as money. You want people to hold onto money because it's money, not because they think the money can go up in value, that's precisely what you don't want. Unfortunately, there are now a lot of people in the bitcoin world who do what the exchange rate of bitcoins to go up, because they view bitcoin's as an investment and they still view dollars as "real money". And in most ways they aren't wrong. But they're also making it harder for anyone else to use bitcoins just as money.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

You are so full of yourself and living in a fantasy world it's sad to watch. Bitcoin isn't a revolution, you've been duped. It's just another pyramid scheme being used by those with more power, more money, more information, and fewer morals to take advantage of folks like you who just want to believe. Do you really want to change the system? Write blogs. Write books. Start a business. Do investigative journalism. Speak at rallies. Work on a campaign. Run for mayor. Run for congress. There are a million ways to empower yourself and others, using bitcoin isn't any of them. Imagining that bitcoin is the answer is about as naive as imagining that hitting "like" on your facebook feed is going to magically feed some starving child somewhere.

dragontamer 14y ago
To be fair, bitcoin has a number of interesting technical promises. The economics of bitcoin are... probably going to be bad, for many reasons. But some decentralized digital coin in some form seems like a good idea. The concept of a transaction log that tracks your money from start to finish is also interesting. Bitcoin will remain a pyramid scheme due to its deflationary nature. But maybe a future coin can be invented that solves the problems with bitcoin?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  To be truly decentralized you need something like "digital cash", but nobody's been able to come up with a good way of implementing that, yet. Also, I'm not sure people are prepared to mix the problems of cash and electronic transactions just yet, there are some advantages to the banking system we have now, such as the ability to reverse fraudulent transactions. I think the example from fiction, Cryptonomicon, is actually very helpful, because they understood they needed a big honking pile of gold to kick-start the legitimacy of the whole thing, if it's just free floating then it too easily becomes a pyramid scheme and you have people who just do currency exchanges but who never actually use the new currency as money. You want people to hold onto money because it's money, not because they think the money can go up in value, that's precisely what you don't want. Unfortunately, there are now a lot of people in the bitcoin world who do what the exchange rate of bitcoins to go up, because they view bitcoin's as an investment and they still view dollars as "real money". And in most ways they aren't wrong. But they're also making it harder for anyone else to use bitcoins just as money.