Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: What problem does bitcoin solve?
by
hugolp
on 31/12/2010, 09:39:54 UTC
If a government currency is always more insecure than a non-government currency, then how do you explain the e-gold fiasco?  I personally know someone who lost US$50K he was keeping in 1MDC at the time 1MDC's account was seized, and I've heard of others who lost even more.  As far as I know, no one uses/trusts e-gold today, despite the best intentions of its founders who were nonetheless forced into complying with the demands of the government after they were falsely arrested on trumped-up charges of money laundering.

The attractive thing about bitcoin is that it seems to be a non-government currency that is relatively free from the coercive force of government at the present time.  I do fear, however, that as the internet becomes regulated more and more, the day may soon come when it will no longer be possible to initiate TCP/UDP connections to arbitrary ports on arbitrary IP addresses -- something that would leave the internet as used by most sheeple intact, while denying services such at those provided by bitcoin, freenetproject, i2p, and any other innovative services that would not be granted waivers by some government-supported regulatory body.  This sort of regulatory action would likely be justified with the standard approach of insisting that it is the only way to keep people safe from terrorism (or whatever the bogey-man of the year is at the time).

In order to stay one step ahead of those who feel threatened by a non-taxable, non-regulated, relatively anonymous currency, I hope some of us will put up with being called paranoid by many others by considering these threats, and come up with effective ways to neutralize them which can be implemented by the development team ahead of time when they become necessary.

What you say is correct. I should have said that government currencies are always more insecure from inflation than voluntary currencies. If governments use force is another game (not saying you should not take the possibility into account).

About the problem of governments controlling the internet the answer is this: http://guifi.net You have a english button there to get a translated site, and you should check the map button on the top right, to see how big is the network. Its basically a private and voluntary tcp/ip network.