Quote from: AnonyMint on February 22, 2014, 02:43:53 AM

Quote from: Pentax on February 21, 2014, 11:23:08 AM

No: The op-ed piece's fundamental underpinning seems to be based on the supposition that government simply won't allow it. While I can see the logic behind that, it is a far from settled issue. We'll see regulation, yes, but outright quashing? I doubt it, except for a handful of places like China, Russia, where you'd kind of expect it in the first place.

Perhaps this OP did not make my position clear enough. I am not arguing that Bitcoin will be shut down.

Quote from: AnonyMint on February 08, 2014, 11:18:27 AM

Daley essentially incorrectly argues that money can't exist without top-down corporate and government control (although he admits it could in a "wild west" mad max world which I think is to some extent where we are headed after 2016), yet correctly argues that Bitcoin has insurmountable (also) flaws for consumer payment without top-down take over while he failed to enumerate many of the reasons Bitcoin is vulnerable to top-down take over. Copying the myopia of most of the Bitcoin community, Andreessen fails to understand the reasons Bitcoin is doomed to a future of top-down control analogous to the top-down global money solutions being patented recently by the major banks.
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Bitcoin Take Over Threats

Those who were anonymous lose it ex post facto, when tax & law enforcement attack a.k.a. "coin taint" the numerous non-anonymous [2]

The government and the financial powers-that-be (who own the government) are not going to allow any decentralized crypto-currency that they can't tax and effectively control.

The powers-that-be will allow Bitcoin because they are already taking control of it (and some of us speculate they even created it). I explained in the OP that they can take control with regulations such as AML and KYC laws, which enable them to identify all (even formerly anonymous) users and tax them. The mining is centralized in a few mining pools thus the financial powers-that-be can eventually take control of the mining.

The point of my OP is that Bitcoin will end up essentially analogous to another VISA, i.e. a fiat compatible system that is top-down controlled a.k.a. centralized.

Ok, I'm not going to debate what the powers that be may do or not do, but Visa is still worth something, yes?

If Bitcoin, in any form, effects the sort of large scale change on the financial system that it is capable of, even to the point of grabbing any substantial market share whatsoever from traditional payments people, Visa, PayPal et al, that is still going to be worth a good pile of cabbage.