I just wonder what would happen if banks have foreseen the future of Bitcoin and see it as an alarming competitor, then they bought tons and tons of bitcoins and continue to do so while its cost is not that high with respect to a currency so that they could hoard bitcoins and keep those from being circulated to other Bitcoin users, in order to hinder the growth of the Bitcoin community and potentially kill it. What do you think boys and girls?
The threat of banking system is not that it can collect all bitcoins etc. "If you want to destroy something good, accept it and become its leader" - sorry I don't remember the exact phrase. For bitcoin getting legitimized and used by banks means that banks will consume and - more importantly - use it like any other currency: over time they will accumulate bitcoins through credit system aquiring control over more and more goods. Deflation of bitcoins will make banks even richer, will leave less bitcoins on the market making every coin more valuable, forcing to divide bitcoin to smaller pieces.
I agree that it's a social problem, but creating (or trying to create) an international currency we must look for ways of solving or at least avoiding this problem. Otherwise bitcoin will get infected by the worst deseases of traditional money.
Ehh, everything? It's completely the opposite thing.
Banks and the ECB (or FED in the U.S.) create money out of thin air. By the billions. All this money printing (well it's not exactly 'printing', just flipping some bits on a few servers) creates more money, making our existing euros or dollars less valuable.
If, for whatever reason (because coins are lost or more people join Bitcoin or whatever), tomorrow the Bitcoin economy decides to value millibitcoins the same as we value bitcoins today, our existing money becomes MORE valuable.
Problem is not in value of coins. It's in bitcoin's
pseudo fixed amount. Inflation is caused by additional emissions that are caused by insufficient amount of money on the market and inflation makes amount of minimal pieces of money grow over time. Deflation means the same lack of money and it also will make us increase
amount of minimal pieces of bitcoin (because of different inevitable losses and because of banking system with its borrowing percent above 0). In other words, there is emission of money in both cases. It's just opposite sides of the same.. coin.
NOT a few privileged puppeteers who can create billions at their whim, screwing over the rest of the world bigtime.
Now we own bitcoin, after some years banks will own it. Most of world's money is owned by banks, especially through debts. Bitcoind in its current form has no built-in defence against such slow and traditionalized form of theft.
And the Bitcoin economy itself is obviously completely independent of any banking system whatsoever. No harm done.
It's independent while it's not accepted, that's all. Governments and laws is fiction, real control comes unofficially - through understanding of global social mechanisms and having 'keys' for manipulating them.
I understand that bitcoin's benefit is in decentralized nature of its transactions. Maybe it will sound a bit too idealistic but, anyway... such a good idea like global decentralized currency must have in it much-much more than just security of transactions. Idea of bitcoin must include social and political aspects. Because what we're trying to do means global responsibility.
