Bitcoin Forum

From reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18pjw4/bitcoin_the_best_tools_have_more_than_one_purpose/). I like #7.

Bitcoin is:

1.) a currency
2.) a distributed and verifiable public ledger
3.) a payment processing network
4.) a triple-entry accounting system
5.) a store of wealth
6.) a cryptosig creation and verification device
7.) a personal offshore bank account

If you can think of anything else that Bitcoin is, please add it.

a key to the cuffs

8.) The first monetary system to credibly offer perfect information to all participants

An amazing, revolutionary, sustainable new type of Ponzi scheme.   :D

9. The greatest form of peaceful protest ever devised

10. A color
11. An element

12) a way of life

13.) a revolutionary means of storing and accessing dynamic information.

14.) A Religion

True, in an odd way.

The word "religion" is thought to be derived from religare, meaning to bind fast. The root of the form also gave us "liege", "allegiance", etc. The Sanskrit word dharma means both "law" and "religion". What we call ancient religion in Asia, Egypt and elsewhere, the people of the time would have just called law.

Everyone using bitcoins is agreeing to be bound by certain laws of mathematics. We're all economically bound to the same laws by using Bitcoin.

Historically, whoever issues the money gets treated like a minor god. The Roman emperors and the various chairmen of the Federal Reserve prove the point. The first mints were temples and the word for "money" even comes from the temple of Juno Moneta, moneta being Latin for "mint".

Bitcoin removes the temptation to godhood as there is no issuer. It might be the most revolutionary thing about the tech.

Damn...sorry for the rant.

15.) A global distributed computing project.

How do you figure?

Everybody has a copy of the blockchain?

I love this!

Me too. It could be also be seen as:

16.) The first consensual economic system

17 ) The in game currency for the internet.  (or just "the currency of the internet")

18.) Fun

So? You still don't know which accounts belong to whom, and sometimes you don't even know things like which part is the change and which is payment.
Pretty far from "perfect information".

19.) The world's largest internet security experiment

But we all know whose coins are whose after the transaction. That's all the perfect information we need.

How do you know that? Does the recepient's name magically appear in the block chain?

You can get that functionality, sure:

http://blockchain.info/tags

Per Tony Gallippi: (http://www.pymnts.com/briefing-room/PYMNTS-International/2013/02/How-Owning-Bitcoin-Is-Owning-An-ETF-On-The-Whole-Bitcoin-Space/?utm_campaign=how-owning-bitcoin-is-owning-an-etf-on-the-whole-bitcoin-space)

20. ) "Bitcoin, the currency and the payment network, is itself an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) on the whole bitcoin space."

21.) A blackhole

No. Who's paid whom is not the monetary system. Monetary systems are typically primarily defined by the money creation and distribution properties, which ARE *perfectly* known in bitcoin. Other systems may purport to offer near perfect information (eq, a gov that says "we will never devalue our currency"), but obviously such declarations are not credible. Even the gold standard had an imprecision component in that it can't be known how much is going to be "discovered" or "mined" in any given future timeframe.

To be more clear for those who may not correctly intuit the term "monetary system":
Bitcoin is the first monetary system to credibly offer perfect money-supply dynamics information to all participants.

This

22) a distributed timestamping system

I stand....educated.

23) An Aladdin's Magic Lamp in the 21st Century

Yep, this formulation is much better.

The Sixth Element.

We do not _agree_ to be bound by mathematics. It is only because many have tried and failed that we have confidence in our understanding of the mathematics.