Bitcoin Forum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUqYrWYrc8o&list=UU0RJJ_Wm7jyOU9eY10LgcwA&index=18

Bill Still, maker of the documentary "The Money Masters," is asked about Bitcoin on Adam vs. The Man. Here's the key exchange which starts at around 14:10:

Kokesh: What is your opinion on Bitcoin as something that is rapidly, at least on a limited scale, displacing the dollar?
Still:  Displacing the dollar? I don't think so.
Kokesh: Well, at least to the tune of 400 million dollars.
Still: 400 million dollars? Well, let's see, and what percentage would that be of the 16 trillion dollar American money supply?
Kokesh: a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket for now
Still: I basically have a lot of trouble being comfortable with Bitcoin. Number one, it was hacked about two years ago. Number two, although it purports to be decentralized money and everybody says 'oh, the security features make it impossible to control centrally,' you know, I just...I have no facts to support it, I just, I'm uncomfortable with the situation.

Well, I'm convinced.

no facts to support his opinion seems about right

he's a greenbacker and minarchist ("We don't want anarchy")

Anyone who says nonsense like that has no credibility. Why can't people just say, " I don't know enough about it to make a comment".

No need to look for conspiracies when plain ignorance and lack of due diligance is sufficient to explain this.

+1. Bitcoin is a high flying UFO. The lower it goes, the more people get to see it more clearly, but with the added side affect that people are frightened by it more for fear of abduction.

Bill Still has a huge amount of credibility as a historian and monetary expert, but he doesn't fully understand Bitcoin. That does not translate as 'Bill Still has no credibility'.
Yes he probably should have stated that he isn't an expert on the cryptographically secure nature of Bitcoin, but it wasn't entirely wrong for him to surmise that Bitcoin is insecure - Mt. Gox makes up the majority of the market, and it is still vulnerable to attack, therefore the price of Bitcoin is also vulnerable to massive instability, at least on a short timescale.
So he didn't realise his comments were actually relating to a Bitcoin exchange, rather than Bitcoin the network - his comments were still partially valid.
If you're serious about promoting Bitcoin, then you should be sending Bill Still emails explaining to him how it works. The more people like Still that Bitcoin has on its side, the better.

Please stop putting people on a pedestal. Saying," I don't know", requires more bravery and humility than making up some bullshit nonsense and saying it with gusto and authority. It shows that he's willing to make up stuff just to keep the authoritative persona intact. That's a serious blow to his credibility in my mind.

He tweets @billstill if anyone feels like giving him a Bitcoin/humility lesson.

+1

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

*In this case it is more ignorance than stupidity. 

what an idiot!

Doesn't he basically say "I don't know" at the end of the quoted text?

He said:

* The current value of 400 million currently doesn't threaten the USD.  [TRUE]

* Bitcoin got hacked.  [FALSE, but generally repeated as true by the press, understandable he got this wrong.]

* For reasons he can't articulate, he just doesn't trust bitcoin in his gut.  [OPINION]

That doesn't sound like he's passing himself off as an authority on bitcoin.

Well I respect the guy after watching some of his doco's, but his opinion on Bitcoin is obviously completely invalid because he appears to know nothing about how it works. Anyone who doesn't understand it is obviously going to be skeptical of the claims made. And also the concept of bitcoin undermines his basic premise that we "have two choices" for who controls the money; private banks or the Government.

Bitcoin relieves us of choices and makes the process entirely decentralized. Clearly this is more desirable than allowing the Government to control money. His trust in the Government is obviously naive, but I would still prefer a debt free currency issued by the state over a debt based currency controlled by central banks; and that's where he has a point.

I mean the Greenback was a good currency. It wasn't debt based (like bitcoin) so it removed power from the banks, and the Government back then was fairly trustworthy. Of course it was still a fiat currency, but in reality bitcoin is a fiat currency with nothing of intrinsic value backing it, although obviously it's quite different from any other fiat currency.

The reality of the situation today, is that even if we wanted a gold standard currency it simply cannot happen because the Government cannot afford the gold required. When it comes to official national currencies, the best option for our Governments is to use state issued fiat money which isn't created as debt. That's realistically the best option for the people.

However I wouldn't agree with him that fiat money is preferable over "sound" money. His dislike of gold is a bit misguided imo, in fact he states that any commodity would make a bad currency. We must also remember that bitcoin is a limited digital commodity. His reasoning seems to be that commodities are horded by the rich and useless as currencies because they are too scarce.

The problem with this logic is that gold is only stored away because we don't use it as a currency. If we dropped the dollar and started using a gold based currency then we would see gold circulating around everywhere. Furthermore, gold is interchangeable with fiat currency. Having a fiat currency isn't the huge disadvantage to the elite that he imagines it to be.

Think about bitcoin, some rich person could come in and buy up a huge portion of the market. Wealth will flow where wealth flows, regardless of the currency you use. Having paper as money doesn't magically make people richer compared to using precious metals as money. The only thing we can do is make the currency harder to manipulate.

But under even a state owned fiat paper money system, it's easy for the people who control the money supply to manipulate the currency and direct the flow of wealth via artificial means. Now in reality this is simply a ploy to offset the "natural" flow of wealth to the rich. And when I say "natural" I mean the wealth flows their way via their huge corporations and banks.

Now of course banks and huge corporations don't exactly play a fair game, they pay their employees slave wages and funnel most of the profits up to their major shareholders. But this is really a business issue concerning the nature of "capitalism" that we now operate under, it isn't a money issue and shouldn't be fixed with money via inflation.

If you don't understand what I'm saying yet, let me put it simply: with a state owned currency the government can create money out of thin air at no cost (right now they trade debt instruments to receive new money). By doing this they cause inflation and the value of the currency in question decreases, thus making the fortunes of the super rich worth less.

And at the same time the new money they create is generally spent on public services such as the building and repair of infrastructure, healthcare and social security spending, and so on. So the general populace, which is mostly the middle class, actually gains wealth overall because the money gets spent on these types of things.

Now of course this new money might often get funneled through to large companies directly (through lucrative gov contracts) or indirectly (via consumer spending etc), and what happens is that the wealth continues to flow to where it "naturally" wants to flow under this current version of capitalism we have. So then the Government rinses and repeats the process.

They keep creating more money regardless of demand and economic growth, it keeps getting sucked up to the super rich, and eventually the amount of money in active circulation is tiny compared to the amount of money which has been horded away by the super rich through this continual funneling process. And now they have extreme power over the market.

They could dump huge amounts of currency onto the market and cause all sorts of other problems. And of course this problem also occurs even when private banks control the issuance of currency, all the new money the central bank creates will undergo the same funneling process. But the point is you can't create a currency which magically makes people wealthy.

All we can do is make it harder to manipulate, as I already mentioned. We can make it more in our favor, by making it non-debt based and thus taking the advantage away from the banks. We can even make it limited in quantity and impossible to create from thin air at no cost, such as the case with bitcoin. But we will never create a currency incapable of flowing to the rich.

That's essentially attempting to build a currency with some sort of inherent self-regulating equality mechanism. It's completely absurd. We will only stop a disproportionate amount of wealth flowing into the hands of a few it we actually look at the system responsible for deciding how wealth is distributed, which is the business framework we use.

So it's not a bad thing to use a commodity as currency (as long as it has sufficient divisibility). We must remember that all our common mediums of exchange, whether a commodity or not, are interchangeable stores of value. The most important thing is making sure our currency is secure, predictable, and decentralized; since trying to centrally manage the distribution of wealth is redundant.

EDIT: also this article I wrote is extremely relevant to this discussion: Fiat Money (http://bitfreak.info/?page=fiatmoney)

A lot of points in your post, but I just want to pick you up on this one. It's false to assume that if gold were the currency, that it would flow freely in the economy. This just isn't true - the major holders of gold would attempt to improve their already good position by monopolizing their supply of gold and trying to freeze out the smaller players. So you end up with the majority of the currency in the hands of the very rich, and practically nothing left for anyone else. The real value of Bill Still's documentaries is in demonstrating through historical example that this is the case - that a commodity-based currency will always tend towards subjugation of the masses through massive economic inequality.
Bitcoin right now is in an interesting position: it is both a 'peoples currency', in the sense that is decentralised and controlled by no-one and everyone, but it also has the potential to be just as regressive a currency as gold has been through history - i.e. it is finite, and cannot be counterfeited or issued by governments, therefore it could be bought and monopolised by the rich, in the same way as gold can.

Thanks for response, I'll reply to your above points quickly but I need to get some sleep so I'll pick up the discussion later if you respond. The first thing I want to point out, is that if gold were used as the most common currency (whether it be in the form of gold certificates or real gold), the elite actually have a motive to keep a certain level of gold in circulation, because without that lower threshold in circulation economic activity would stutter and come to a halt, meaning their businesses would also suffer as a result and they would see their incomes dry up. There's an inherent point of stability.

Second of all, most of the money ends up in the hands of the rich even if we use fiat money, through the processes I explained. And in fact by trying to fix this problem by creating more fiat money to even out the waters, the long term end result is that they simply make the problem worse than it was to begin with because of the wealth funneling process that I described. That's exactly what is happening right now, the vast amount of the currency in circulation is not in active circulation, but rather in the bank accounts of the super rich; but they always leave us with just enough to conduct our business.

And as we continue to inject more and more money into circulation as a futile attempt to solve all our problems, the continual funneling process creates an ever growing gap between the rich and poor, rather than stopping at the inherent point of stability associated with sound money.

No conspiracy. Bill Still is a wacko. And you dont need his opinions on Bitcoin for that. Just read what he says about economics and you will realize.

In retrospect, the hacking of MtGox was beneficial to bitcoin. It kept such people away, thus allowing services to build up.

Wow even the brightest of documentary makers dont do their due diligence. "bitcoin was hacked" = Mtgox was hacked.

Not the same thing lol..

Bill Still so fail.  :D

This is where generational things of change are hard to grasp. Older generation likes hard assets you can touch. Today we can be rest assured that digital assets like bitcoin and litecoin are indeed real.

It really bothers me when people go around claiming Bitcoin is somehow a fiat currency. Look up what fiat money means and you will know that Bitcoin is NOT fiat. I really shouldn't be posting this because people will probably try to retort and derail (k maybe this post is a bit of a derail)...but they are wrong. Just look it up!

I did and apparently it's an Italian car?  ???

If you looked it up properly you would know bitcoin is a fiat currency.

If he was talking about what happened to a certain large market, that was a bitcoin market, not bitcoin, that got hacked. Big difference.

The market format needs to be changed.

Please..  ::) Define intrinsic value without using a circular argument.. You can't. All value is subjective. Even all meaning of words is subjective, so one can very well say bitcoins are fiat money.

But.. if one goes by old traditions of what people most commonly used the word fiat for back when they spoke Latin it's clear bitcoins are not fiat money, because fiat, back then, meant "let it be so" i.e. a command, i.e. a government decree and bitcoins, unlike dollars, certainly do not have value or are used because of a government's decree.

But yes, we can argue like 5 year old idiots whether bitcoins are fiat money, and we can ignore history and claim they are, OR we can focus on what actually matters and what bitcoins actually bring to the table and RECOGNIZE that Bitcoin is a FIRST OF IT'S KIND TECHNOLOGY and comparing it with anything we had up until now is at best inadequate and much more likely just plain old fallacy.



I don't know about you all, but I have decided, at least for myself, that I'm simply not going to take anyone serious who doesn't treat Bitcoin like that. Period. If you are someone who doesn't recognize that it's a first of it's kind technology and not comparable to anything we had before, then "you" are irrelevant and a waste of my time.

I want to believe.

this is just in

Bill Still does not approve  :-[

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDgnu5B1SJM

I remember when Bill Still appeared during George W's first term on a radio station I listen to.  Bill thought George was a good president, much to the embarrassment of the programs hosts.

Still is a man of very deep biases that make it hard for him to see things objectively.

There's a lesson there for all of us: beware of ideology.  Seek truth and see things as they are.

Beware of those that are certain. The strongest red flag is a highly controversial opinion conveyed with complete certainty. Also: people that seem to fall in a certain category. Educated people tend to excel in variety.

I have no idea what he is talking about..

All biblical things about BTC users expecting the devil and other people doing god's will by helping other people..

And still, Still got me originally thinking about a lot of things. I hope he has gotten himself some Bitcoins nonetheless   :P

dang!! what happened?

Bill lost his mind?  :'( :'(

It was?  oh man SHA256 is done, that its I am selling all my BTC ...  :P

Bill Still on the Bitcoin: March 29th 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qDgnu5B1SJM#!

Still still rocks !  ;) ;D :D

Well he is not wrong: look it up, there have been two cases now where major flaws in the source have been found and luckily fixed by getting everyone to update and recalculate the blockchain (this fixing he forgets to mention)

But its worth thinking about... What if the next bug accidentally doubles all mining output? Do you really think all the large mining pools will be as quick to update their version to take away their benefit?

Unless I'm mistaken I don't think in any way could a "flaw in the source" around 2 years ago be considered Bitcoin having been hacked.  It seems most likely he was talking about the Mt Gox hack which as other people mentioned is a far cry from Bitcoin itself being hacked.

Also thinking about the next bug accidentally doubling all mining output is probably merited as much as thinking about the next fed dollar printing creating potentially volatile explosive bills.

I think it's fine if some people are skeptical of the future permanency of Bitcoin, it is still experimental after all.  However if you are going to take that stance you should base it on researched fact rather than quote fiction to back up your uninformed gut feeling, especially so when it's going on record.  It is funny to watch the fans of this guy do mental gymnastics to attempt to rationalize his dumb comment though.

Still has always been consistent, he say's WHAT money is is irrelevant, its WHO CONTROLS THE SUPPLY!

His opposition to Gold has always been due to the inevitable small-elite-group which ALREADY controls the supply of Gold, when he looks at BTC he sees something that's already concentrated in a few hands and which is even easier to monopolize then Gold because the supply is fixed, thus he rejects it on the same grounds.  Present him with ANY kind of monetary reform or movement and his first and only question will be who is/will control the supply, if it's anything other then "The People through the Democratic process" he will give it a thumbs down.

Democracy is not controlled by the people to start with, so he has a problem.

But watching his movies and how historically inaccurate they are Im not surprised the least about his way of thinking.

 I have deep respect for Bill Still. His documentary was one of the things that led me to bitcoin. And I noted that in his report on youtube he says "You can make a lot of money by trading in bitcoins...." ;)

so you mean he sparked the current rally  ;)