Tangential, but a subject of some local interest:
Why Bitcoin will fail by Avery Pennarun. "The sky isn't red." Thesis:
- The gold standard was a bad idea.
- Even if it [Bitcoin] was a good idea, governments will squash it.
- The whole technological basis (cryptosystem) is flawed.
- It doesn't work offline.
I'm not sure I buy these and am not competent to evaluate his claims on 3., but would like others' critique.
L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen by Jason Calacanis. A rather more enthusiastic viewpoint of the project:
- Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.
- Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.
- Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.
- Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.
- Bitcoin is a political statement by technological libertarians.
- Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.
The actual text contains many more caveats than the eye-catching selection of points above.
The first article is spectacularly clueless on (1) (he simply lacks the relevant knowledge to express an informed opinion on the topic one way or another), but pretty much completely right on (2). I lack the expertise to judge the claims on (3), and he's clearly wrong on (4). So it's one or two out of four, depending on whether his claims about (3) are correct.
As for the second article, it says "Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution." Well, duh, many things would be unstoppable without prosecuting the people involved in them. So they get prosecuted. Unless you're a rare expert ready to go to extraordinary lengths, there is no anonymity on the internet if the government is decided to come after you.
It's not quite "duh" - the original Napster and eGold died because the US Government could prosecute those who ran the services, at much lower cost (both monetary and electoral) than prosecuting enough users of those systems to kill them. It's a point worth making that Bitcoin doesn't have a single central hub that can be killed easily.
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