Quote from: creighto on April 27, 2011, 10:00:26 PM

I find this revelation to be supportive of Bitcoin's future. If they are openly asking a major representative of the Bitcoin community to speak, that means that they not only have looked at it fairly closely and have judged generally that it's not a threat or a crime (meaning they are not going to commit resources to destroy the network) it also means that someone has a use for Bitcoin.

Keep in mind, they have a use for Tor, and if every Tor node were owned by the feds, it woundn't be very useful to them either.

It might also explain some of the mystery money that has been flowing into MtGox and driving the price. If the CIA has a use for it, they are going to have to have some of it.

If this presentation goes well, and tells them what they really would like to verifiy (they don't ask questions that they don't already have strong opinions on, like lawyers never ask questions in court that they haven't already researched, the CIA has access to some truly high class programmers themselves) then just imagine the level of hashing power that the feds could bring to Bitcoin.

I know that most people think that the fact that the US FRN is the international reserve currency is a major boon for the US economy, but there are some very notable downsides. In some ways it's in the interests of the US to gently back away from that role. Bitcoin could help that endeavor.

can u explain the downsides of being the reserve currency?