Wow... No Way ..

Um sorry theymos. Little guns wont stop military from killing you... Just let me remind you of Soviets. Ukranians even had well armed militia, which got wiped out pretty quickly by NKVD. And that's back when the military didn't have the toys they have now.

Most military questions have both a strategic and a tactical component. Let's consider the tactical.

A friend of mine owns an instructive piece of history. It is a small, crude pistol, made out of sheet-metal stampings by the U.S. during World War II. While it fits in the palm of your hand and is a slowly-operated, single-shot arm, it's powerful .45 caliber projectile will kill a man with brutal efficiency. With a short, smooth-bore barrel it can reliably kill only at point blank ranges, so its use requires the will (brave or foolhardy) to get in close before firing. It is less a soldier's weapon than an assassin's tool. The U.S. manufactured them by the million during the war, not for our own forces but rather to be air-dropped behind German lines to resistance units in occupied Europe. Crude and slow (the fired case had to be knocked out of the breech by means of a little wooden dowel, a fresh round procured from the storage area in the grip and then manually reloaded and cocked) and so wildly inaccurate it couldn't hit the broad side of a French barn at 50 meters, to the Resistance man or woman who had no firearm it still looked pretty darn good.

The theory and practice of it was this:

    They called the pistol the "Liberator." Not a bad name, all in all.

Now let's consider the strategic aspect of the question, "What good can a handgun do against an army....?" We have seen that even a poor pistol can make a great deal of difference to the military career and postwar plans of one enemy soldier. That's tactical. But consider what a million pistols, or a hundred million pistols (which may approach the actual number of handguns in the U.S. today), can mean to the military planner who seeks to carry out operations against a populace so armed. Mention "Afghanistan" or "Chechnya" to a member of the current Russian military hierarchy and watch them shudder at the bloody memories. Then you begin to get the idea that modern munitions, air superiority and overwhelming, precision-guided violence still are not enough to make victory certain when the targets are not sitting Christmas- present fashion out in the middle of the desert.

In the long run Bitcoin as a disruptive technology is just as harmful to Dwolla profit model as it is to PayPal's.

It's okay for us to have a difference of opinion. We can just call each other liars and be on our respective ways.

The CRA was not a static piece of legislation. It evolved over the years from a relatively hands-off law focused on process into one that focused on outcomes. Regulators, beginning in the mid-nineties, began to hold banks accountable in serious ways. Banks responded to this new accountability by increasing the CRA loans they made, a move that entailed relaxing their lending standards.

Throughout the nineties banks, as banks lowered their mortgage standards, mortgage rates remained high. The laxity was spreading but the incentives for borrowers to re-finance even under relaxed standards remained low. New buyers often still didn’t know that some of the loosey-goosey mortgages existed. Speculators had an internet bubble, so they weren’t yet attracted to real-estate. Treasury rates were not yet so low that investors seeking yield would pour into mortgage backed securities. Securitization levels were low enough that banks weren’t yet willing to fully embrace the loose standards. The historical data on default and loss rates from the lax lending were not yet available, so they weren’t embraced by banks or the broader market.

But as the years went by, these factors changed. The Fed pushed interest rates down. This made refinancing more attractive, and created an investor demand for yield. Fannie and Freddie popularized low-income securitization. Low defaults and loss rates from lax loans made them seem not as risky as previously expected.  A shrinking consumer asset base thanks to the dot com bust created a demand for home-equity loans and high loan-to-value loans, as consumers exchanged high-interest credit card debt for low interest home debt. Speculators seeking higher returns and ordinary home buyers became aware that lax lending standards would allow them to buy bigger homes with little or no money down.

In short, the lax lending standards created in response to the CRA had dug a pit that was waiting to get filled when the circumstances were right.

Feel free to have a laugh at my expense.

Bitcoin and unregulated financial markets just leads to massive scamming.

Well if $18 falls....

Gold can exist without Internet. Bitcoin can't.
Gold can exist without electricity. Bitcoin can't.
Gold can exist without humans. Bitcoin can't.
Gold doesn't depend on SHA 256 algorithm and how NSA breaks cryptographic algos. Bitcoin does.

Nice suggestions here, but backing has a specific meaning regarding money, and bitcoin is not backed by anything. So drivel along, but use another word.

Most Economically Illiterate Journalist In History Proposes “Gold is Backed by Nothing, but US Dollar Backed by Federal Reserve”
http://maxkeiser.com/2012/09/03/gold-backed-nothing/

I find that what one should see as ideal depends for some large part on the situation in which the currency is to be used.
Casinos have a different view on what is an ideal medium of exchange than, say, society as a whole.

So how do you define "ideal media of exchange" ?

1: existing as an archetypal idea
2a : existing as a mental image or in fancy or imagination only;

Oh I see, the problem is actually that you don't understand what the meaning of "being backed by" is.. Tell me, can I cash in my 1btc or 1gram of gold and get utility as ideal medium of exchange out of them? And how does utility as ideal medium of exchange look like?

valued properties != backing, mkay?