4 ms·

Tell that to the Greeks! How "protected" did their money turn out to be?

• arethuza 13y ago
  Don't you mean the Cypriots? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financial_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financi... And weren't a lot of the people who were hit by the levy on deposits actually non-Cypriots using Cypriot banks as tax havens?
  • glimmung 13y ago
    No, I did mean the Greeks - but neither country is a great argument for the "fiat currency good, Bitcoin bad" argument. Re. non-Cypriots, I'm sure that you're right - but the subject was the state's management of its currency, regardless of who owns it. One thing that your example does flush out though is that fiat currency can be crippled by speculation too - and at least Bitcoin does not conflate a currency and a tax regime. I'm not a cheerleader for Bitcoin specifically, I'm just really, really sceptical about the robustness of traditional currency.
• stephencanon 13y ago
  Given that the Greek government didn't simply close the country, pretty well.
  • glimmung 13y ago
    I'm not quite sure how one "closes" a country, but they have abdicated responsibility for many of the core functions of government, and to the individual citizens who are affected I'm sure the government seems "closed", if not the country [1]. Details and semantics aside, my point was that the security that governments allegedly bring to currency, and which Bitcoin allegedly lacks, is often much less concrete than we would wish. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/24/christine-lagarde-troika-wrong-on-greece http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/24/christi...