The dollar is down 3.7% today.

The only role for deposit banks in a Bitcoin world is to steal money from old people who don't know how to use computers.

So far the success rate for Bitcoin businesses that hold third party deposits in terms of not losing/stealing their customers' funds tends toward zero the longer such businesses operate.

Like this?

It's Libreoffice's inability to make charts that don't look ugly.

I periodically import the data from bitcoincharts.com into a Libreoffice spreadsheet and play around with it.

The US dollar resumes its collapse after enjoying a brief respite:

Wasn't anyone paying attention to how the apparatchik behaved during the final days of the USSR?

Those bitcoins will quietly end up in the personal wallet of somebody well-connected.

In general I am highly sceptical of the inherent value of most financial products. We've only ever seen what a financial industry looks like when it it is subsidized and protected from competition by state power.

I suspect that in a Bitcoin world loans would tend to be short duration, relatively expensive, and rare.

I also suspect that securities would also be far less prevalent, as well as hierarchical business structures.

We're living in a world where business and financial markets are organized basically the same way they have been since the mid 19th century. We have better ways of achieving beneficial divisions of labour and deferred consumption now, or at least we'll have an opportunity to experiment with better models once the State monopoly in this area is effectively broken.

Conformal Systems, and bits of proof, and Amir Taaki have already done that.

I'll never accept fractionally-reserved promises to deliver bitcoins in lieu of actual bitcoins.

I might pause from time to time to observe a moment of silence to honour the losses of those who do.

Don't Get Zhou Tonged.

So far in 2013 alone, the US Dollar has lost 93% of its value compared to Bitcoin.

Why?

A gold backed cryptocurrency would need to do everything Bitcoin does in order to be an effective medium of exchange, and it would also have the added expense of gathering, storing, transporting, securing, and auditing blocks of yellow metal.

What benefit does the yellow metal provide that makes it worth all the added expense and effort?

Mastercoins are designed to work like XRP - the Mastercoin people are going to create a bunch of wonderful services that can only be paid for with Mastercoins, thus establishing demand and an exchange rate between Mastercoins and bitcoins.

Many of these services are going to be open source.

What stops anyone from cloning these open source applications and modifying them such that they can be paid for with any arbitrary bitcoin, not just Mastercoins?

Why would customers prefer services which restrict the acceptable payment methods to Mastercoins over services which accept Bitcoin directly?

This is a great insight.

Most people don't really understand what the world would look like with honest money, and so instead insist on miming the strategies of today's central planners.

I'd call it "viral regulation".

Two centuries ago, upwards of 98% of the population was involved with food production.

After labour saving devices were invented which allowed a tiny minority of the population to feed everyone there was massive societal upheaval as an overwhelming majority of the populations suddenly had nothing to do at all until some intrepid central planners came along to set everything straight, tell everybody what to do, and save the day.

Oh wait, actually that's not at all what happened. When people stopped needing to farm they figured out how to reallocate their time and effort all by themselves.

Never mind.

Output scripts are contracts. The contracts precisely specify what conditions are both necessary and sufficient for an output to be spent.

If the Bitcoin network ever stops honouring these contracts, then the currency and the network have a value of zero.