Bankers' Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene

Bitcoin: The Electronic Currency of the Future

November 24, 2010

The Market Oracle - Cryptography expert Satoshi Nakamoto has created the first completely decentralized, anonymous, electronic currency, called Bitcoin. Bitcoins are divisible digital tokens that can be exchanged across the internet or stored on disk. Bitcoin differs greatly from traditional government issued fiat currency and regulated banking in several important aspects:

• Bitcoins have no central issuer, whereas fiat currency is issued at will by a central bank. Currently, Bitcoins are slowly being issued in a decentralized manner, but eventually new issuance will forever halt.


• Bitcoin transactions are private and anonymous, whereas current law allows only licensed financial institutions to conduct wire transactions within the banking system. With Bitcoin, no third party can spy on overall transactions.


• Bitcoin ownership is safe, so confiscation is nearly impossible.

Bitcoin also differs from gold in important ways. Gold has the advantage of thousands of years of historical precedent as money, as well as having a physical form. Unlike any “soft” currency, gold lasts forever.

The only disadvantage of gold is that ownership cannot be transferred electronically (or with paper certificates) without requiring a central repository. The unfortunate fate of both E-Gold and the Liberty Dollar is evidence of the fact that any centralization of a currency system is vulnerable to outside monitoring, tampering or outright confiscation.

With Bitcoin “there is no central database for police to raid and no way for your Bitcoins to be stolen” at the institutional level.

Is the Bitcoin the Currency of the Future?

August 6, 2009

Ludwig von Mises Institute - One day, while I was learning about cyberspace, I discovered BitCoin. BitCoin is a completely decentralized, anonymous online monetary system that relies on a distributed database to facilitate transactions. The creator put a great deal of effort into ensuring that the system is secure and reliable.

Unfortunately, there are no real assets backing the currency of BitCoin (and no coercive government backing it either). Thus ends BitCoin.

I can imagine, though, a system like BitCoin that allows people to write promissory notes and sign them with an RSA digital signature (to prevent counterfeiting). These promissory notes could be backed by gold, silver, fiat currencies, stocks and bonds, or pretty much anything. Then, these notes could be transferred from one person to another anonymously.

Couple this with an ebay-like service that allows people to swap these virtual currencies. Say, for example, that I have a gold note issued by a bank in South Africa. Since taking delivery of the gold could be a problem, I trade my notes for notes issued by a bank in U.S.A. Then, I can redeem those notes and have them FedEx me the gold (insured, of course).

This system would be Fed-proof, IRS-proof, FBI-proof and judgment-proof. This system would protect the users against monetary inflation, making it Fed-proof. Since nobody has a bossman ratting out their earnings, it is IRS-proof. It is FBI and NSA proof because all transactions are encrypted and anonymous. And, most importantly, it is judgment-proof because it is perfectly legal.

There are, at present, no laws that could be used to criminalize what I propose. Laws against money-laundering, for example, do not apply because there is no way to prove that the money came from an illegal source, such as drug dealing. Laws against tax-evasion do not apply either, because no taxes have ever been levied on imaginary currency. In addition, if you had your day in court, you could defend yourself on First Amendment grounds. Besides, international free trade agreements also have generous loopholes.

So what we are dealing with is anarcho-capitalism and wildcat banking on a global scale. If not for my non-existent programming skills, I'd be forking a new project off BitCoin right now.

Anybody here know C++?