yes get the government involved so we can no longer have privacy and taxless transactions. Morons...
Remember that the technology is neutral. Some of you are assuming that just because a bunch of libertarians have adopted Bitcoin (and tried to push out anyone who isn't a libertarian), that people with other agendas can't adopt the technology for their own purposes.
Actually
anyone can make a cryptocurrency, including a city council and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Hull council are being rather revolutionary:
* they haven't used taxpayer money for this, it's funded by a donation
* they've creatively thought of a way for people to earn these coins through work (a key part of a crypto-economy, and one that bitcoin hasn't cracked yet, though other alts like devcoin are actively working on this)
* they are going to use their influence to try to get local supermarkets to accept the coin, probably in it's raw form without an exchange, like some many local "trading points" schemes. If successful, they'll have a real economy around their alt.
Suppose we have another 2008 banking meltdown and this time govts arn't able to unblock the system and people simply don't get paid their wages and businesses can't buy and sell stuff.
Well, Hull will be well placed, because they'll have done the ground work to have a payment system that by-passes the banks, so people can buy their groceries and pay their rent.
For everyone else it'll be hell. It'll be hell even for bitcoin people, because many of the businesses that
pretend to accept bitcoin do nothing of the sort - they rely on intermediaries to change the money into dollars, and pay them in dollars, and they receive their dollars via the current banking system.
So all power to the elected representatives of Hull - they're trying to achieve something bitcoin hasn't managed yet.
Also, Hullcoin may succeed because they're simply talking about supporting the local economy, there is no ideology involved. Bitcoin's biggest achilles heel is that some people are trying to force a libertarian agenda on everyone, and the majority of the world isn't libertarian. Trying to insist that anyone who adopts bitcoin
must adopt libertarianism is the biggest thing holding bitcoin back - people don't like to be
forced into anything.
