Bitcoin Forum

Canadian Mint ready to test its own digital money project

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/19/canadian-mint-pushes-ahead-in-murky-world-of-crypto-currency-with-mintchip-project/

MintChip is dead.... Long live MintChip!

Edit: Be sure to watch the news clip at the bottom of the article, an attempt to explain bitcoin to two news anchors. Destined to become a classic.

Remember the Mint-Chip challenge? They asked the question: "What would mintchip be useful for?" The #1 answer was "to buy bitcoin". So they took it down and went with another "winner".  ::)

Yes, that was priceless... There's no way this project will fly in a post-Snowden world. One of the developers - or at least someone purporting to be - claimed this was engineered with full government backdoor access.

Hilarious how he has to resort to lies to get people to come onboard:

"What they’re really doing is giving a digital representation of money, and it really requires a federally regulated body to be able to do true digital currency."

Um, no, actually a federally regulated body is the kiss of death for "true" (sound) digital currency.

"Because its digital, the cost of managing it — and one of the primary responsibilities of government is running the money supply — is much lower. You’re re not constantly replacing lost and warn out coins. Theoretically, instead of an entire government organization like the Mint, all you need is a laptop and a good economist."

:D

void budgetCheck()
{
    if(CurrentExpenses > AvailableFunds)
    {
        MintChip.DebaseCurrency(1, "Trillion");
    }
}

I remember that pretty well. They just proved that the Canadian dollar is managed by a bunch of liars and cheaters. Well done Mintchip!

That video is EPIC.

I love that tec guys enthusiasm but he did a terrible job of trying to explain what it is.  No fault of his own.  It is just difficult to grasp the complex and revolutionary idea of a decentralized currency.

1. You can mine bitcoin
2. You can earn bitcoin
3 You can buy bitcoin

You can use bitcoin to purchase or exchange value with anyone who wants it and who has something you want.

Bottom Line.   If two people agree on the value of a transaction then it is no different then any other transfer of value. 

Hah, yeah, he tried, but not very well prepared or presented at all... I think I'm more confused after listening to him... Need to erase this convo from my head...

Put these two together and you can see why it will be destined to fail long term.  It will become too rich a target to leave alone and will become the government's piggy-bank to hit whenever a 'crisis' hits.  The Canadian Mint may get time from it (if they even get it off the ground), like the did with fiat, and bank accounts, but when you have currency by decree, long term it will fail.

:-)

i love the video. the anchors are so brainwashed. did they ever ask themselves "where actually IS my money on my online banking account?" ? do they really think there is a drawer with their account # in the bank where some clerk has put in their balance in paper money ? back in the old days people always worried about if this strange pieces of paper are really backed by enough gold (and sometimes it wasn´t...) but we have a different problem:

is it backed by gold ? hell no, there isn´t even enough PAPER available for all the money that exists on all these accounts. people like those anchors believe in the intrinsic value of paper money  :D

One very significant issue with Mintchip is that the technology is dependent upon propriety drivers with no support for GNU / Linux and OSX. http://mintchipchallenge.challengepost.com/forum_topics/827 (http://mintchipchallenge.challengepost.com/forum_topics/827).  This does beg the question does this technology depend upon security by obscurity and DRM buried in propriety code?

This Canadian simply prefers Bitcoin stored on GNU / Linux.

Yes, and seriously, something like Mint-Chip could very well make it easier to exchange CAD for BTC (and vice versa).  We'll just have to wait and see how irreversible and instantaneous it is.  Something like this might allow both parties of an exchange to send their payments to escrow.

All mint chip is doing is giving the government the license to track what you spend your money on.
The pseudo-anonymous ledger means that all transactions of any sort can be traced to addresses in the long run.
Bitcoin has the same issue but handing it to the government brings up a whole new ballpark of personal privacy issues.

Seems paradoxial
Government backing a digitial currency but still able to produce as much money as it wants.
Its not really safe to say that an online currency supported by government money printing is a crytocurrency.

The video was
Hmm he tried I give him a few points for it

And I would consequently guess based on their web site, no iOS or Android.