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It's uninformative to conflate monetary policy with the underlying material/technology used for currency. The two are totally and entirely unrelated. It's like
by nmrm 12y ago
It's uninformative to conflate monetary policy with the underlying material/technology used for currency. The two are totally and entirely unrelated. It's like claiming that changing from paper to (still fiat) coins is good because this would cause a fundamental shift in the nation's purportedly destructive monetary policy and also paper rips which is a bummer. So coins > paper, clearly.
Which is to say, you are really making two totally independent claims. One is at least plausible and the other isn't.
The first is that bitcoin provides a viable alternative to current methods for exchanging fiat currency. This is probably the most sensible argument for cryptographic currency, and I think is worth discussing. The discussion below delves into some specific arguments on this issue.
Your second claim is that decentralized cryptographic currency will or ever could/should replace state-backed fiat currency. I don't think this is a particularly useful point to discuss, since informed prediction is impossible and the prescription mostly amounts to political persuasion.
edit: but also, the US could switch to a cryptographic currency with all of the practical benefits of bitcoin, and still retain basically the same amount of control over its currency. Technology can never solve big political problems.
- zanny 12y agoI'm not conflating them, they go together. Digital money is better than dead trees, or metal discs. Cryptographically secure algorithms are better than goons with a printing press. Bitcoin and other crytocurrencies enable both. I also recognize the vast majority of fiat is now tied up in digital forms. The actual amount of physical paper money is negligible. But the overhead induced by the entire system being based upon dead tree leaflets, is that it is irrevocably slow and the discretization makes no sense in a digital medium.
- nmrm 12y ago> I'm not conflating them, they go together. No, they really don't. > Cryptographically secure algorithms are better than goons with a printing press. Again, technology cannot solve political problems. There are two scenarios: the government provides a cypto-currency to provide its practical advantages, or a private currency overtakes usd. If the government proves a crypto-currency (not terribly likely, but the more likely of the two alternatives), then probably it would retain the same amount of control it has now. Technology cannot solve political problems. The latter presupposes the government wouldn't shut down the currency and that there's political will for your preferred monetary policy anyways. In which case technology didn't solve a political problem, politics solves a political problem. Anyways, I prefer my democratically elected "goons" to an algorithm chosen by a small group of people.