Bitcoin Forum

From the article:

Bitcoin is not about making rapid global transactions with little or no fee. Bitcoin is about preventing monetary tyranny. That is its raison d’être.

Monetary tyranny can take many ugly forms. It can be deliberate inflation, persecutory capital controls, prearranged defaults within the banking cartel, or even worse, blatant sovereign confiscation. Sadly, those threats are a potential in almost any jurisdiction in the world today. The United States does not have a monopoly on monetary repression and monetary tyranny.


Read more at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/10/04/bitcoin-prevents-monetary-tyranny/

That's a brilliant article and on a well respected mainstream website too  :D

Yes. It's always nice to see bitcoin featured on mainstream sites such as Forbes.

Great article, but is Bitcoin really best served by a picture of Mel Gibson from Braveheart??!

Would you prefer a picture of Bruce Wagner? ;)

If you believe the conspiracy theories about Jews and banking, it might be appropriate :D

Wow great to see a well written positive article about bitcoins.

great read, which highlights a few old things on different topics.
im actually laughing at how people think bitcoin isnt centralised.

when one entity is the powerhouse controlling the value of a commodity then it becomes centralised. for instance.. most people base BTC value on mtgox prices.

centralisation and tyranny are different things.. centralisation is in fiat terms.. the national reserve and banks. tyranny is the government and its financial laws and taxes.

in btc terms centralisation is trade exchange sites setting the value. tyranny is ... well hopefully no one..

if you truly want to be decentralised. then forget the US dollar conversion prices of MTGOX when purchasing. and when someone sells an item u pay what you think is a fair amount based purely on how much TIME you spent earning that BTC.

eg if you work all week earning fiat you already have an understanding that a percentage of your weekly income equals your food bill.. so if working all day ends up as enough currency to go to a bar get as drunk as you can and buy a fastfood meal at the end of the evening then thats what you expect to get for the amount of bitcoin you can mine in a day.

go back to the medieval days, when a butcher would carve up a healthy size beef steak which took him 30 minutes to prepare in exchange for 30 minutes time with a prostitute.. as an example.

the use of gold and then later FIAT was a centralised method to balance value, to make it a fair comparison so trades became equal for both parties.

tyranny is the other subject. i like how bitcoins are not solely owned by EG mtgox, etc ( and although i use them as a fair value comparison when trading) i know they cannot control my use of it, unlike governments do with FIAT.

after reading the article im just wondering about legality of bitcoins (specifically bitpay, MTGOX BTC-E and other exchanges) in regards to "unlicensed money transmitting business" laws.

You know, u make an interesting point. I wonder what the bitcoin economy would look like if people didnt care about the BTC -> USD conversion value and traded soley on how long it took them to get make that BTC ..
What if people simply just placed some sort of worth on BTC, not represented by any fiat currency.
Hrm, that would be hard for every individual to gauge. I guess it would be like strictly bartering then.

I ono, not an expert on economies or 'currencies' =P ...
just interesting ideas thou..

Pretty rad article, thanks for sharing!

Nice article!

Great to see BTC getting mainstream attention. Forbes seems to be fairly warm to bitcoin. Hopefully more will follow.

Indeed, capital control is a nasty tool that government will have absolutely no hesitation in using in the coming years when the FIAT currency war will be raging. With bitcoin, you can cross any border with large amount of any currency by simply having your eWallet .dat file saved on a USB key, it will be that easy.

This video [http://youtu.be/ujdWCXxGC9g?t=12m30s (http://youtu.be/ujdWCXxGC9g?t=12m30s)] is interesting in that matter...

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