To be frank, dollars are backed by banks.  Because it's next to illegal to use anything else but the prescribed national currency (see: liberty dollars), you're SoL and at the mercy of whatever the higher-ups decide to do with that currency.  It's completely out of the hands of the people.

On the other side of the spectrum is Bitcoin, which also is also backed by "nothing", but to correlate it with fiat, it's backed by the public.  In other words, we're in control of its price, and where it goes.

No, frozen carrots would be better as food, which is why you'd eat them instead of trade them for something else (like more food.)  Bitcoin makes the perfect money because it does nothing outside of being money.  There's no incentive to use it in any other application.

Did you learn your lesson?

kokjo:  People don't generally buy gold because they want to use them on cables (but probably will buy them as jewelry, which is a lot like using gold as a store of wealth/showing off wealth.  Looking pretty is exactly why people think it's valuable.)

But the point I'd like to make is that because Gold is useful in many applications, it should not be used as money.  The fact that Bitcoin can literally do nothing but act as money is one of its better qualities; you don't want Bitcoin to have any other uses.  This is why we don't store wealth in food; not only does food rot, but it has a very important purpose, which is, being sustenance.  Certain items are better at this, precious metals being one, but even they have many applications in the real world.

Bitcoin does not.  It does nothing but be money.  It cannot be used in any other way.  It will never be used in any other way.  Nobody can say, "Well we need Bitcoin to build our space ships and it's kinda expensive so we need subsidies" no, it will never happen.  Bitcoin has value only because it is given value, the same as gold, minus the uses outside of storing wealth.

Stability is good, but gold hasn't been doing so hot lately, and has been going down in price pretty consistently.  The downside would be, wherever gold goes, Bitcoin would have to follow; plus, there's no way to peg it without any legal fiction to back it, which would mean government would get involved.  If a bank-owned government actually wanted to do this, I'd say:

My name is Mikalai, and I'm a Bitcoinaholic.

But but but progress and innovation   What's with the government and hating anything which can help them succeed?

Whoops-i-doodle.

You made a wise decision.

Not physically, no, but people are real.

To expand on my last post, having Bitcoin "backed" by something would only remove its credibility as something which can work on its own.  Bitcoin is perfectly fine as-is.  If it's pegged to a commodity, it implies Bitcoin was worthless before it was pegged to said commodity.  This is wrong.  Bitcoin has many uses that nothing else can do; Bitcoin is the very first of its kind.  It's valuable because these traits are non-existent in any other commodity, especially if you realize what the banks are about nowadays.

Does gold have something backing it?

Yes: people who believe it has value. 

Survey says!

No.

Don't worry.  I don't get it either.

Ouch.  All the more reason to adopt Bitcoin in all its naked glory

Wasn't Gox supposed to ditch its western users at some point in time?

Not yet, anyway.  Until Bitcoin sees majority adoption in any given area, it'll stick with being valued against fiat, as opposed to fiat being valued against Bitcoin.

I demand stickers!

In that case, you'd be missing out on the actual trading of Bitcoin; if you've ever used Gox, you would simply be making a "market order", and would purchase Bitcoin at the lowest asking price.  Not bad if you don't wanna fuck with exchanges, I suppose; I assume this is close to what Coinbase was doing before "sorry we're out of Bitcoin thank you come again"

I was just about to post this same thing